Employing Feature Engineering for River Stage Forecasting to Improve Hybrid Model Performance

Establishing early warning systems and efficient management of water resources in tidal reaches is crucial for achieving adequate flood protection. In tidal reaches, the river stage interacts non-linearly with tides (downstream) and discharge (upstream), making the modeling of river processes extremely complex. Data-driven methods have proven helpful for predicting the river stage parameter. This contrasts with existing numerical approaches, which suffer from several limitations. The aim of this study was to predict the river stage of the upstream part of the tidal river, where the influence of salinity is present during the summer months. Using the CNN-LSTM model trained on historical records of the discharge (station of the variable to be predicted), the river stage of three downstream stations, and the point of interest, the prediction was carried out up to 24 hours in advance. By incorporating feature engineering, we achieved an improvement in model results for the longest horizon, confirmed by standard performance metrics, and considered it efficient and effective for risk mitigation. Introducing feature engineering into the data preprocessing resulted in a predictive performance improvement of 0.98% for the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) metric, 7.0% for the root mean squared error (RMSE) metric, and 7.25% for the mean absolute error (MAE) metric over the second and third-best scenarios using a spectrogram and time-series data.