Flood Prediction Using Rainfall-Flow Pattern in Data-Sparse Watersheds

Real-time flood forecasting of small- and medium-sized rivers in areas with scarce hydrological data is an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Traditional hydrological model parameters cannot be fully trained owing to a lack of data; thus, results obtained by such models are not satisfactory. We need a new way to solve the forecasting problem for small- and medium-sized rivers. We found that the time series of some feature variables have evident change trajectories in spatial dimension, and the change of some feature variables in the spatial dimension has a decisive influence on flooding processes, such as the spatial distribution of rainfall. To reflect the change of feature variables in spatial dimension with to solve the problem of the lack of hydrological data, we constructed a rainfall-flow pattern composed of a spatial-temporal dynamic time warping algorithm and multi-feature algorithm to measure the similarity of hydrological time series. In the experimental watersheds, we used rainfall-flow patterns to forecast the short-term flood streamflow, and satisfactory results were obtained. This suggests that the algorithm is suitable for hydrological studies and improves the accuracy of real-time flood forecasting for longer forecast periods.