Toward Optimal Rainfall for Flood Prediction in Headwater Basins -
Orographic QPE error modeling using machine learning
Abstract
Quantitative Precipitation Estimates (QPE) from merged rain gauge and
radar measurements have become widely available in the last two decades.
The errors associated with these products are yet to be fully
understood, especially in complex terrain where ground clutter and
overshooting artifacts are significant and vary in space and time
depending on the storm and underlying synoptic conditions. The location
and timing of precipitation in addition to rainfall intensity and
duration are critical to the simulation of flood response in headwater
basins. This work proposes a generalizable Physics-guided Artificial
Intelligence (PAI) framework for QPE error modeling. First, QPE error
climatology derived from the hydrologic Inverse Rainfall Correction
(Liao & Barros, 2022) to historical floods in selected headwater basins
is analyzed to identify dominant precipitation regimes. Second, for each
precipitation regime, a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) error prediction
model is trained using event-specific precipitation metrics at hourly
scale as input, and subsequently used to predict estimation errors for
various QPE products. The corrected QPE can then be used for hydrologic
simulations and flood nowcasting. The PAI framework is demonstrated in
the Southern Appalachian Mountains using the 57 largest floods over
2008-2017. The Probability Distribution Function of predicted
precipitation errors follows a Gaussian-like distribution but varies
significantly between cold and warm season events, while the spatial
distribution is inextricably connected to basin geomorphology. On
average, large improvements on hourly KGE from -0.5 to 0.4 are achieved,
and the peak flood error is reduced by 70%, with distinctively better
results for cold season events.