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Detecting hydrological droughts in ungauged areas from remotely sensed hydro-meteorological variables using rule-based models

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Abstract

As a method of detecting hydrological droughts in ungauged areas, we propose rule-based models using percentiles from remotely sensed key hydro-meteorological variables. Four rule-based models of the Decision Trees, Adaptive Boosting of Decision Trees (Adaboost), Random Forest, and Extremely Randomized Trees are used for their capabilities of modeling nonlinear relationships, and their results are compared to the multiple linear regression. The temporal information of month and the percentiles of key variables of water and energy balance including precipitation, actual evapotranspiration, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), land surface temperature, and soil moisture are used as input variables. Drought severity values are calculated from streamflow percentiles for 3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month time scales as an indicator for hydrological droughts. Data from six basins of the case study area are used for tuning model parameters and training, and the remaining two basins are used for final evaluation. Models with an ensemble of trees successfully detect hydrological droughts despite the limited input variables (for Adaboost, correlation coefficients ≥ 0.85, mean absolute error ≤ 0.12, root-mean-square error–observations standard deviation ratio ≤ 0.53, and larger Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency of drought severity ≥ 0.72 for the test data set). The most important variable is precipitation, followed by soil moisture (3-month time scale) or NDVI (longer time scales). Hydrological droughts in various time scales are detected in ungauged areas of the case study area. Serious droughts in early 2002, from late 2006 to mid-2007, from early 2008 to 2009, and from mid-2013 to 2017 are detected.

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All relevant data are within the manuscript and its supporting information files.

Abbreviations

7Q10:

The annual minimum 7-day mean streamflow with an annual exceedance probability of 90%

ANNs:

Artificial neural networks

BoM:

Bureau of meteorology

CCA:

Canonical correlation analysis

EANN:

Ensemble of ANNs

ELM:

Extreme learning machine

EMI:

El Nino-Southern Oscillation Modoki Index

Full-tobit:

Type I tobit regression

GAM:

Gaussian generalized additive model

GBM:

Gradient boosting machine

GEFS:

NOAA global ensemble forecasting system

GEP:

Gene expression programming

GLM:

Gaussian linear regression model

GRNN:

Generalized regression neural networks

IOD:

Indian Ocean Dipole Index

KKNN:

Kernel-k-nearest neighbors

LR:

Linear regression

LSM:

Land surface model

MARS:

Multivariate adaptive regression splines

NLCCA:

Nonlinear ANN-based canonical correlation analysis

OK:

Ordinary kriging

OSELM:

Online sequential extreme learning machines

OSMLR:

Online sequential multiple linear regression

PDO:

Pacific Decadal Oscillation Index

RBF:

Radial basis function

ROI-tobit:

Region-of-influence type I tobit

SOI:

Southern Oscillation Index

SST:

Sea surface temperature

SVMG:

Support vector machine with a Gaussian kernel

SVMP:

Support vector machine with a polynomial kernel

SVR:

Support vector regression

WMDP:

Water Monitoring Data Portal

WSC:

Water Survey of Canada

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the APEC Climate Center.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Climate Services and Research Department, APEC Climate Center, Busan, Republic of Korea

    Jinyoung Rhee, Kyungwon Park, Seongkyu Lee & Sangmin Jang

  2. Department of Safety and Disaster Prevention Research, Seoul Institute of Technology, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Sunkwon Yoon

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  1. Jinyoung Rhee
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Correspondence to Jinyoung Rhee.

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Appendix

Appendix

Relevant literature on hydrological drought monitoring and/or forecasting using machine learning models (Table 3).

Table 3 Summary of relevant literature on hydrological drought monitoring and/or forecasting using machine learning models
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Rhee, J., Park, K., Lee, S. et al. Detecting hydrological droughts in ungauged areas from remotely sensed hydro-meteorological variables using rule-based models. Nat Hazards 103, 2961–2988 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04114-5

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