Improved National-Scale Flood Prediction for Gauged and Ungauged Basins
using a Spatio-temporal Hierarchical Model
Abstract
Floods cause hundreds of fatalities and billions of dollars of economic
loss each year in the United States. To mitigate these damages, accurate
flood prediction is needed for issuing early warnings to the public.
This situation is exacerbated in larger model domains for high flows,
particularly in ungauged basins. To improve flood prediction for both
gauged and ungauged basins, we propose a spatio-temporal hierarchical
model (STHM) to improve high flow estimation using a 10-day window of
modeled National Water Model (NWM) streamflow and a variety of catchment
characteristics as input. The STHM is calibrated (1993-2008) and
validated (2009-2018) in controlled, natural, and coastal basins over
three broad groups, and shows significant improvement for the first two
basin types. A seasonal analysis shows the most influential predictors
are the previous 3-day average streamflow and the aridity index for
controlled and natural basins, respectively. To evaluate the STHM in
improving streamflow in ungauged basins, 20-fold cross-validation is
performed by leaving 5% of sites. Results show that the STHM increases
predictive skill in over 50% of sites by 0.1 Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency
(NSE) and improves over 65% of sites’ streamflow prediction to an
NSE>0.67, which demonstrates that the STHM is one of the
first of its kind and could be employed for flood prediction in both
gauged and ungauged basins.