Development of a surrogate model to improve the efficiency of groundwater level fluctuation pattern-based hydrologic properties evaluation

In this study, a method of aquifer hydrologic property estimation incorporating the deep learning method was developed to improve the estimation efficiency of a process-based model based on groundwater level fluctuation (GLF) patterns. As a reference study, a data-driven method suggested by Jeong et al. (2020) was considered; the uncertainty of the GLF patterns resulting from different yearly patterns of precipitation, which were considered as noise in the previous study, was effectively discarded using the newly proposed method of applying the conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). The CVAE was used to acquire the specific GLF patterns under certain identical precipitation patterns for all the monitoring stations. The data-driven hydrologic property estimation model was developed to predict two hydrologic parameters (ρ and k) of the process-based model using the generated GLF patterns from the CVAE network as the input variables. The actual GLF and precipitation data that were acquired from nationwide groundwater monitoring stations in South Korea were applied to validate the developed method. It was found that the estimated and target hydrologic properties were highly correlated (correlation coefficients [CC]: 0.9833 and 0.9589 for ρ and k, respectively), which significantly improved the results when compared to the previous study (CC: 0.7207 and 0.8663 for α/n and k, respectively). Consequently, the developed model can contribute to a more accurate hydrologic property estimation of aquifers. Additionally, it can facilitate efficient groundwater development planning since the manual fitting of the process-based model by an expert is not required.