Explainable AI-driven assessment of hydro climatic interactions shaping river discharge dynamics in a monsoonal basin

Accurate river discharge forecasting is essential for effective water resource management, particularly in regions prone to monsoonal variability and extreme weather events. This study presents an interpretable deep learning framework for daily river discharge forecasting in the Subarnarekha river basin (SRB), integrating Kolmogorov Arnold networks (KAN) with Shapley additive exPlanations (SHAP). Leveraging hydroclimatic inputs from five coupled model intercomparison project phase 6 (CMIP6) general circulation models (GCM) under the high emissions shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP585) scenario, the model was trained and evaluated across four active gauging stations: Muri, Adityapur, Jamshedpur, and Ghatsila covering the period 1980 to 2022, with projections extending to 2100. The main findings of this study are (1) KAN demonstrated high predictive performance with root mean squared error (RMSE) values ranging from 42.7 to 58.3 m³/s, Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) between 0.80 and 0.87, mean absolute error (MAE) between 28.9 to 52.7 and R² values between 0.84 and 0.90 across stations. (2) SHAP based feature contribution analysis identified Relative humidity (hurs), specific humidity (huss), and temperature (tas) as key predictors, while (pr) showed limited contribution due to spatial inherent inconsistencies in GCM precipitation data. (3) The bootstrapped SHAP distributions highlighted substantial variability in feature importance, particularly for humidity variables, revealing station specific uncertainty patterns in model interpretation. (4) The KAN framework results indicate strong temporal alignment and physical realism, confirming KAN's robustness in capturing seasonal discharge dynamics and extreme flow events under monsoon influence environments. (5) In this study KAN with SHAP (SHapley additive exPlanations) is implemented for hydrological modeling under monsoon-influenced and data-limited regions such as SRB, offering improved accuracy, functional precision and efficiency compared to traditional models. The explainability offered by SHAP confirms informed water resource planning. This novel framework presents a reproducible and climate-resilient decision support tool, particularly suitable for monsoon-influenced, data-limited basins susceptible to extreme hydroclimatic events.