Uncertainty propagation analysis for distributed hydrological forecasting using a neural network

Abstract The last few decades have presented a significant increase in hydrological disasters, such as floods. In some countries, most of the environmental, socioeconomic, and biodiversity losses are caused by floods. Thus, flood forecasting is crucial to support an efficient disaster warning system. This work proposes a model for hydrological forecasting based on a neural network with a geographically aligned input named GeoNN. It employs weather radar data to obtain accumulated rainfall in each grid cell of the watershed and make 15‐ and 120‐min predictions of the outlet river level. An uncertainty propagation analysis was performed for GeoNN from a collection of test cases obtained by either using different schemes of the dataset partitioning or introducing different additive‐noise rates to the input data to provide a probability of flood occurrence and also an ensemble prediction. Both this probability and the ensemble were able to detect occurrences of river levels exceeding a given flood threshold.