Spatio-temporal multivariable time vario-zoom network for water level forecasting based on high-resolution hydrological dataset

Abstract

Water level forecasting is a crucial element in river-basin water resource management, particularly for shipping and extreme events, such as floods and droughts. However, accurately forecasting water levels is challenging due to the influence of non-stationarity hydrological processes, complex characteristic variables, and noisy data. Data-driven approaches in water level forecasting generally lack annotated high-resolution data. To address these problems, this paper presents the first hydrological dataset on the Xijiang River basin-Xijiang Water Dataset (XJWD) and a Spatio-Temporal Multivariable-based Time Vario-Zoom Network (STM- TVZN) model. XJWD combines multi-source raw hydrological data and has real-time and higher resolution data than comparable datasets. STM-TVZN is specifically tailored to enhance the discernment of salient features within key time windows for each variable by fusing spatio-temporal multivariate features through vario-zoom time windows. Finally, a novel metric, Extremum Time Offsets (ETO), is proposed to evaluate the accuracy of the occurrence of local extremum in time series, and it is significant for predicting and evaluating extremum events such as floods and droughts. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed existing models on XJWD dataset regarding error rate, stationarity, similarity, and ETO. Overall, the proposed method of combining time-variable focusing network design and spatio-temporal multivariate feature extraction is appealing for short-term water level forecasting in inland rivers, exhibiting potential capacity in strategic water-saving planning and extremum event forecasting caused by climate change.