Deep learning for cross-region streamflow and flood forecasting at a global scale

Streamflow and flood forecasting remains one of the long-standing challenges in hydrology. Traditional physically based models are hampered by sparse parameters and complex calibration procedures particularly in ungauged catchments. We propose a novel hybrid deep learning model termed encoder-decoder double-layer long short-term memory (ED-DLSTM) to address streamflow forecasting at global scale for all (gauged and ungauged) catchments. Using historical datasets, ED-DLSTM yields a mean Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE) of 0.75 across more than 2,000 catchments from the United States, Canada, Central Europe, and the United Kingdom, highlighting improvements by the state-of-the-art machine learning over traditional hydrologic models. Moreover, ED-DLSTM is applied to 160 ungauged catchments in Chile and 76.9% of catchments obtain NSE >0 in the best situation. The interpretability of cross-region capacities of ED-DLSTM are established through the cell state induced by adding a spatial attribute encoding module, which can spontaneously form hydrological regionalization effects after performing spatial coding for different catchments. The study demonstrates the potential of deep leaning methods to overcome the ubiquitous lack of hydrologic information and deficiencies in physical model structure and parameterization.