Toward routing river water in land surface models with recurrent neural networks

Abstract. Machine learning is playing an increasing role in hydrology, supplementing or replacing physics-based models. One notable example is the use of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for forecasting streamflow given observed precipitation and geographic characteristics. Training of such a model over the continental United States (CONUS) has demonstrated that a single set of model parameters can be used across independent catchments, and that RNNs can outperform physics-based models. In this work, we take a next step and study the performance of RNNs for river routing in land surface models (LSMs). Instead of observed precipitation, the LSM-RNN uses instantaneous runoff calculated from physics-based models as an input. We train the model with data from river basins spanning the globe and test it using historical streamflow measurements. The model demonstrates skill at generalization across basins (predicting streamflow in catchments not used in training) and across time (predicting streamflow during years not used in training). We compare the predictions from the LSM-RNN with results from an existing physics-based model calibrated with a similar dataset and find that the LSM-RNN outperforms the physics-based model: a gain in median Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) from 0.56 to 0.64 (time-split experiment) and from 0.30 to 0.34 (basin-split experiment). Our results show that RNNs are effective for global streamflow prediction from runoff inputs and motivate the development of complete routing models that can capture nested sub-basis connections.