Spatiotemporal convolutional long short-term memory for regional streamflow predictions

Rainfall-runoff (RR) modelling is a challenging task in hydrology, especially at the regional scale. This work presents an approach to simultaneously predict daily streamflow in 86 catchments across the US using a sequential CNN-LSTM deep learning architecture. The model effectively incorporates both spatial and temporal information, leveraging the CNN to encode spatial patterns and the LSTM to learn their temporal relations. For training, a year-long spatially distributed input with precipitation, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature for each day was used to predict one-day streamflow. The trained CNN-LSTM model was further fine-tuned for three local sub-clusters of the 86 stations, assessing the significance of fine-tuning in model performance. The CNN-LSTM model, post fine-tuning, exhibited strong predictive capabilities with a median Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) of 0.62 over the test period. Remarkably, 65% of the 86 stations achieved NSE values greater than 0.6. The performance of the model was also compared to different deep learning models trained using a similar setup (CNN, LSTM, ANN). An LSTM model was also developed and trained individually to predict for each of the stations using local data. The CNN-LSTM model outperformed all the models which was trained regionally, and achieved a comparable performance to the local LSTM model. Fine-tuning improved the performance of all models during the test period. The results highlight the potential of the CNN-LSTM approach for regional RR modelling by effectively capturing complex spatiotemporal patterns inherent in the RR process.