Multi-Step Ahead Water Level Forecasting Using Deep Neural Networks

Stream gauge height (water level) is a significant indicator for forecasting future floods. Flooding occurs when the water level exceeds the flood stage. Predicting imminent floods can save lives, protect infrastructure, and improve road traffic management and transportation. Deep neural networks have been increasingly used in this domain due to their predictive capabilities in capturing complex features and interdependencies. This study employs four distinct models—Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), transformer, and LSTNet—with MLP serving as the baseline model to forecast water levels. The models are trained using data from 20 distinct river gages across the state of Missouri to ensure consistent performance. Random search optimization is employed for hyperparameter tuning. The prediction intervals are set at 4, 6, 8, and 10 (each interval equivalent to 30 min) to ensure that performance results are robust and not due to random weight initialization or suboptimal hyperparameters and are consistent throughout different prediction intervals. The findings of this study indicate that the LSTNet model leads to a better performance than the other models, with a median RMSE of 0.00724, 0.00959, 0.01204, and 0.01230 for the 4, 6, 8, and 10 intervals, respectively. As climate change leads to localized storms driven by atmospheric shifts, water level fluctuations are becoming increasingly extreme, further exacerbating data drift in real-world datasets. The LSTNet model demonstrates superior performance in terms of RMSE, MAE, and the correlation coefficient across all prediction intervals when forecasting water levels under data drift conditions.