Simulation of river stage using artificial neural network and MIKE 11 hydrodynamic model

Abstract

Simulation of water levels at different sections of a river using physically based flood routing models is quite cumbersome, because it requires many types of data such as hydrologic time series, river geometry, hydraulics of existing control structures and channel roughness coefficients. Normally in developing countries like India it is not easy to collect these data because of poor monitoring and record keeping. Therefore, an artificial neural network (ANN) technique is used as an effective alternative in hydrologic simulation studies. The present study aims at comparing the performance of the ANN technique with a widely used physically based hydrodynamic model in the MIKE 11 environment. The MIKE 11 hydrodynamic model was calibrated and validated for the monsoon periods (June–September) of the years 2006 and 2001, respectively. Feed forward neural network architecture with Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) back propagation training algorithm was used to train the neural network model using hourly water level data of the period June–September 2006. The trained ANN model was tested using data for the same period of the year 2001. Simulated water levels by the MIKE 11HD were compared with the corresponding water levels predicted by the ANN model. The results obtained from the ANN model were found to be much better than that of the MIKE 11HD results as indicated by the values of the goodness of fit indices used in the study. The Nash–Sutcliffe index ( E) and root mean square error (RMSE) obtained in case of the ANN model were found to be 0.8419 and 0.8939 m, respectively, during model testing, whereas in case of MIKE 11HD, the values of E and RMSE were found to be 0.7836 and 1.00 m, respectively, during model validation. The difference between the observed and simulated peak water levels obtained from the ANN model was found to be much lower than that of MIKE 11HD. The study reveals that the use of Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm with eight hidden neurons in the hidden layer is sufficient to produce satisfactory results.