Journal of Korea Water Resources Association ISSN:2799-8746(Print) 2799-8754(Online) 한국수자원학회 논문집

In recent, the hydrological regime of the Mekong river is changing drastically due to climate change and haphazard watershed development including dam construction. Information of hydrologic feature like streamflow of the Mekong river are required for water disaster prevention and sustainable water resources development in the river sharing countries. In this study, runoff simulations at the Kratie station of the lower Mekong river are performed using SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool), a physics-based hydrologic model, and LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory), a data-driven deep learning algorithm. The SWAT model was set up based on globally-available database (topography: HydroSHED, landuse: GLCF-MODIS, soil: FAO-Soil map, rainfall: APHRODITE, etc) and then simulated daily discharge from 2003 to 2007. The LSTM was built using deep learning open-source library TensorFlow and the deep-layer neural networks of the LSTM were trained based merely on daily water level data of 10 upper stations of the Kratie during two periods: 2000~2002 and 2008~2014. Then, LSTM simulated daily discharge for 2003~2007 as in SWAT model. The simulation results show that Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) of each model were calculated at 0.9(SWAT) and 0.99(LSTM), respectively. In order to simply simulate hydrological time series of ungauged large watersheds, data-driven model like the LSTM method is more applicable than the physics-based hydrological model having complexity due to various database pressure because it is able to memorize the preceding time series sequences and reflect them to prediction.