Daily Water Flow Forecasting via Coupling Between SMAP and Deep Learning

Hydrological models are essential tools to forecast daily water resources’ availability, which are used to plan the short-term electrical systems’ operation. However, there is a trade-off when choosing a given model. Complex models may provide good results depending on very complicated analytical and optimization procedures beyond sophisticated data, whereas simpler models offer reasonable results with much more amenable tuning approaches. To improve the quality of simpler models this article proposes the coupling of the Soil Moisture Accounting Procedure (SMAP) hydrological model with a Deep Learning architecture based on Conv3D-LSTM. In the proposed methodology, the SMAP is first optimized to obtain general parameters of the hydrographic basin. This optimized model’s output is used as input to the Conv3D-LSTM estimator to provide the final results. This gray estimator model can generate fast and accurate results. Studies whit the goal of forecast the natural flow seven days ahead are carried out for two large Brazilian hydroelectric plants to validate the method. The results obtained by the architecture are better than those obtained with decoupled techniques.