Abstract
Skillful forecasts of daily streamflow on river networks are crucial for
flood mitigation, especially in rainfall-driven river basins. This is of
acute importance on the Narmada River Basin in Central India, which is
driven by the summer monsoon rainfall, and floods lead to heavy loss of
life and infrastructure. Physical hydrologic models based on the land
surface model – Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC), have been
developed in an experimental mode to model and forecast the hydrologic
system, which includes – storage, soil moisture and runoff – by
incorporating rainfall data from the India Meteorological Department
(IMD). To enhance the forecast skill by model-combination, we propose a
coupled physical-statistical modeling framework. In this, we couple the
VIC model with a novel Bayesian Hierarchical Network Model (BHNM) for
daily streamflow forecasts that uses the network topology to capture the
spatial dependence. The daily streamflow at each station is modelled as
Gamma distribution with time-varying parameters. The distribution
parameters for each day are modeled as a linear function of covariates,
which include antecedent streamflow from upstream gauges and, daily
2-day, or 3-day precipitation from the upstream contributing areas -
that reflect the antecedent land conditions. The posterior distribution
of the model parameters and, consequently, the predictive posterior
distribution of the daily streamflow at each station and for each day
are obtained. To the BHNM model, we will couple the VIC model by
including the hydrologic forecasts – especially soil moisture and
storage – as additional covariates. The coupled model will be
demonstrated by its application to daily summer (July-August) streamflow
at 4 gauges in the Narmada basin network for the period 1978 – 2014.
The skill of the probabilistic forecast will be assessed using rank
histograms and skill scores such as CRPS and RPS. The model skill will
also be tested on five high flooding events on both the timing and
magnitude. These model combinations will enable to combine the strengths
of the individual models in capturing the hydrologic processes, biases
and nonstationary relationships, to provide skillful daily streamflow
forecasts. This will be of immense help in flood mitigation.