A Multivariate ANN-Wavelet Approach for Rainfall–Runoff Modeling

Without a doubt the first step in any water resources management is the rainfall–runoff modeling over the watershed. However considering high stochastic property of the process, many models are being still developed in order to define such a complex phenomenon in the field of hydrologic engineering. Recently Artificial Neural Network (ANN) as a non-linear inter-extrapolator is extensively used by hydrologists for rainfall–runoff modeling as well as other fields of hydrology. In the current research, the wavelet analysis was linked to the ANN concept for modeling Ligvanchai watershed rainfall–runoff process at Tabriz, Iran. For this purpose the main time series of two variables, rainfall and runoff, were decomposed to some multi-frequently time series by wavelet theory, then these time series were imposed as input data to the ANN to predict the runoff discharge 1 day ahead. The obtained results show the proposed model can predict both short and long term runoff discharges because of using multi-scale time series of rainfall and runoff data as the ANN input layer. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009