Enhancing Multi-Horizon Probabilistic Water Level Forecasting Using Horizon- and Event-Aware Deep Learning Models

Accurate multi-horizon forecasting of reservoir water levels is essential for effective water resource management and flood risk mitigation. While deep learning models have demonstrated strong predictive capabilities, they often struggle to adequately represent uncertainty and extreme hydrological events, particularly at longer forecast horizons. This study proposes four variants of a Conv1D–LSTM–Temporal Attention (CLTA) architecture for probabilistic multi-horizon forecasting, differing exclusively in loss function design. The models incorporate non-crossing constraints, horizon-aware weighting, and event-aware weighting to address key limitations of standard quantile regression approaches. All models are trained on hourly water level data from May 2021 to October 2022 and evaluated on a fully unseen dataset spanning December 2022 to May 2023. The results demonstrate that horizon-aware weighting achieves the lowest average RMSE (0.0149) and the most stable performance across forecast horizons on unseen data, while event-aware weighting improves representation of extreme hydrological events and achieves the highest coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.9961). However, a controlled experiment further reveals that model performance is strongly influenced by the data partitioning strategy, even when architecture and loss formulation are held constant. Overall, the findings indicate that loss function design, in interaction with data partitioning strategy, is a key contributing factor to model performance in deep learning-based hydrological forecasting. A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) framework identifies the horizon-weighted model as the most robust general-purpose solution, while the event-aware model is preferable for applications focused on extreme event representation. These results highlight the importance of integrating domain knowledge into both model design and evaluation strategy, offering a scalable and computationally efficient alternative to increasing architectural complexity.