Dual Artificial Neural Network for Rainfall-Runoff Forecasting.docVIP

Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 2012, 4, 1024-1028 /10.4236/jwarp.2012.412118 Published Online December 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jwarp) Dual Artificial Neural Network for Rainfall-Runoff Forecasting Pallavi Mittal, Swaptik Chowdhury, Sangeeta Roy, Nikhil Bhatia, Roshan Srivastav MBS, VIT University, Vellore, India Email: roshan1979@ Received October 1, 2012; revised November 3, 2012; accepted November 14, 2012 ABSTRACT One of the principal issues related to hydrologic models for prediction of runoff is the estimation of extreme values (floods). It is well understood that unless the models capture the dynamics of rainfall-runoff process, the improvement in prediction of such extremes is far from reality. In this paper, it is proposed to develop a dual (combined and paral- leled) artificial neural network (D-ANN), which aims to improve the models performance, especially in terms of ex- treme values. The performance of the proposed dual-ANN model is compared with that of feed forward ANN (FF-ANN) model, the later being the most common ANN model used in hydrologic literature. The forecasting exercise is carried out for hourly river flow data of Kolar Basin, India. The results of the comparison indicate that the D-ANN model per- forms better than the FF-ANN model. Keywords: Forecasting; Hybrid Model; ANN; Floods; Non Linear 1. Introduction popular in terms of flood forecasting. Recently the application of artificial neural networks (ANNs) has marked an impact in the area of hydrological modelling. ANNs are fundamentally semi-parametric regression estimators which are well-matched for hydro- logical modelling, as they can predict virtually any (measurable) function up to a random degree of precision [7]. Major benefit of this approach over previous meth- ods is the lack of complexity in the statistical form rep- resentation i.e. no precise process for algorithmically converting an