Prediction of water level in a tidal river using a deep-learning based LSTM model

Discharge or water level predictions at tidally affected river reaches are currently still a great challenge in hydrological practices. This research aims to predict water level of the tide dominated site, Jamsu bridge in the Han River downstream. Physics-based hydrodynamic approaches are sometimes not applicable for water level prediction in such a tidal river due to uncertainty sources like rainfall forecasting data. In this study, TensorFlow deep learning framework was used to build a deep neural network based LSTM model and its applications. The LSTM model was trained based on 3 data sets having 10-min temporal resolution: Paldang dam release, Jamsu bridge water level, predicted tidal level for 6 years (2011~2016) and then predict the water level time series given the six lead times: 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 24 hours. The optimal hyper-parameters of LSTM model were set up as follows: 6 hidden layers number, 0.01 learning rate, 3000 iterations. In addition, we changed the key parameter of LSTM model, sequence length, ranging from 1 to 6 hours to test its affect to prediction results. The LSTM model with the 1 hr sequence length led to the best performing prediction results for the all cases. In particular, it resulted in very accurate prediction: RMSE (0.065 cm) and NSE (0.99) for the 1 hr lead time prediction case. However, as the lead time became longer, the RMSE increased from 0.08 m (1 hr lead time) to 0.28 m (24 hrs lead time) and the NSE decreased from 0.99 (1 hr lead time) to 0.74 (24 hrs lead time), respectively.