Flow rate prediction at Paldang Bridge using deep learning models

Recently, in the field of water resource engineering, interest in predicting time series water levels and flow rates using deep learning technology that has rapidly developed along with the Fourth Industrial Revolution is increasing. In addition, although water-level and flow-rate prediction have been performed using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model that can predict time-series data, the accuracy of flow-rate prediction in rivers with rapid temporal fluctuations was predicted to be very low compared to that of water-level prediction. In this study, the Paldang Bridge Station of the Han River, which has a large flow-rate fluctuation and little influence from tidal waves in the estuary, was selected. In addition, time-series data with large flow fluctuations were selected to collect water-level and flow-rate data for 2 years and 7 months, which are relatively short in data length, to be used as training and prediction data for the LSTM and GRU models. When learning time-series water levels with very high time fluctuation in two models, the predicted water-level results in both models secured appropriate accuracy compared to observation water levels, but when training rapidly temporal fluctuation flow rates directly in two models, the predicted flow rates deteriorated significantly. Therefore, in this study, in order to accurately predict the rapidly changing flow rate, the water-level data predicted by the two models could be used as input data for the rating curve to significantly improve the prediction accuracy of the flow rates. Finally, the results of this study are expected to be sufficiently used as the data of flood warning system in urban rivers where the observation length of hydrological data is not relatively long and the flow-rate changes rapidly.