Nonlinear Model for Drought Forecasting Based on a Conjunction of Wavelet Transforms and Neural Networks
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 8, Issue 6
Abstract
Droughts are destructive climatic extreme events that may cause significant damage both in natural environments and in human lives. Drought forecasting plays an important role in the control and management of water resources systems. In this study, a conjunction model is presented to forecast droughts. The proposed conjunction model is based on dyadic wavelet transforms and neural networks. Neural networks have shown great ability in modeling and forecasting nonlinear and nonstationary time series in a water resources engineering, and wavelet transforms provide useful decompositions of an original time series. The wavelet-transformed data aid in improving the model performance by capturing helpful information on various resolution levels. Neural networks are used to forecast decomposed subsignals in various resolution levels and reconstruct forecasted subsignals. The model was applied to forecast droughts in the Conchos River Basin in Mexico, which is the most important tributary of the Lower Rio Grande/Bravo. The performance of the conjunction model was measured using various forecast skill criteria. The results indicate that the conjunction model significantly improves the ability of neural networks to forecast the indexed regional drought.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Alley, W. M.(1984). “The Palmer drought severity index: limitations and assumptions.” J. Clim. Appl. Meteorol., 23, 1100–1109.
ASCE Task Committee on Application of Artificial Neural Networks in Hydrology. (2000). “Artificial neural networks in hydrology. II: Hydrologic applications.” J. Hydrologic Eng., 5(2), 124–137.
Aussem, A., Campbell, J., and Murtagh, F.(1998). “Wavelet-based feature extraction and decomposition strategies for financial forecasting.” J. Comput. Intelli. Fin., 6(2), 5–12.
Aussem, A., and Murtagh, F.(1997). “Combining neural network forecasts on wavelet-transformed time series.” Connection Sci., 9(1), 113–121.
Dai, H. C., and Macbeth, C.(1997). “Effects of learning parameters on learning procedure and performance of a BPNN.” Neural Networks, 10(8), 1505–1521.
Demuth, H., and Beale, M. (1994). Neural network toolbox: For use with MATLAB, The MathWorks, Natick, Mass., 448.
European Southern Observatory (1998). ESO-MIDAS user guide volume B data reduction, München, Germany.
Fletcher, D., and Goss, E.(1993). “Forecasting with neural networks: An application using bankruptcy data.” Info. Manag., 24, 159–167.
Gabor, D.(1946). “Theory of communication.” J. Inst. Electr. Eng., Part 1, 93, 429–457.
Grossmann, A., and Morlet, J.(1984). “Decomposition of Hardy functions into square integrable wavelets of constant shape.” SIAM (Soc. Ind. Appl. Math.) J. Math. Anal., 15, 723–736.
Gupta, H. V., Hsu, K., and Sorooshian, S. (2000). “Effective and efficient modeling for streamflow forecasting.” Artificial neural networks in hydrology, R. S. Govindaraju and A. R. Rao, eds., Kluwer Academic, Boston, 7–22.
Haykin, S. (1994). Neural networks: A comprehensive foundation. MacMillan, New York, 696.
Hsu, K., Gupta, H. V., and Sorooshian, S.(1995). “Artificial neural network modeling of the rainfall-runoff process.” Water Resour. Res., 31(10), 2517–2530.
International Boundary and Water Commission. (2002). “Deliveries of waters allotted to the United States under Article 4 of the United States-Mexico water treaty of 1944.” U.S. Section Report, El Paso, Tex.
Kelly, M. E. (2001). “The Rio Conchos: A preliminary overview,” Texas Center for Policy Studies, 〈http://www.texascenter.org/borderwater/〉 (Oct. 1, 2002).
Kim, T., Valdés, J. B., and Aparicio, J.(2002). “Frequency and spatial characteristics of droughts in the Conchos River Basin, Mexico.” Water Int., 27(3), 420–430.
Kim, T., Valdés, J. B., and Yoo, C.(2003). “A nonparametric approach for estimating return periods of droughts in arid regions.” J. Hydrologic Eng., 8(5), 237–246.
Labat, D., Ababou, R., and Mangin, A.(2000). “Rainfall-runoff relationships for karstic springs. Part II: continuous wavelet and discrete orthogonal multiresolution analyses.” J. Hydrol., 238, 149–178.
Liu, Z., Valdés, J. B., and Entekhabi, D.(1998). “Merging and error analysis of regional hydrometeorologic anomaly forecasts conditioned on climate precursors.” Water Resour. Res., 34(8), 1959–1969.
Maier, H. R., and Dandy, G. C.(2000). “Neural networks for the prediction and forecasting of water resources variables; a review of modeling issues and applications.” Environ. Model. Software, 15, 101–124.
Makridakis, S., Wheelwright, S. C., and McGee, V. E. (1983). Forecasting: Methods and applications, Wiley, New York, 923.
Mallat, S. G. (1998). A wavelet tour of signal processing, Academic, San Diego, 577.
Misiti, M., Misiti, Y., Oppenheim, G., and Poggi, J. (2000). Wavelet tool-box: For use with MATLAB, The MathWorks, Natick, Mass., 941.
National Drought Policy Commission. (2000). Preparing for drought in the 21st century, Washington, D.C.
NOAA Paleoclimatology Program. (2000). North American drought: A paleo perspective, National Climatic Data Center, Boulder, Colo.
Palmer, W. C. (1965). “Meteorological drought.” Research Paper No. 45, U.S. Weather Bureau, Washington, D.C., 58.
Rao, R. M., and Bopardikar, A. S. (1998). Wavelet transforms: Introduction to theory and applications, Addison-Wesley, Mass., 310.
Riebsame, W. E., Changnon, S. A., and Karl, T. R. (1991). “Drought and natural resources management in the United States: Impacts and implications of the 1987–89 drought.” Westview Press, Boulder, Colo., 11–92.
Schmandt, J.(2002). “Bi-national water issues in the Rio Grand/Ro Bravo basin.” Water Policy, 4(2), 137–155.
Tang, Z., and Fishwick, P. A.(1993). “Feedforward neural nets as models for time series forecasting.” J. Comput., 5(4), 374–385.
Torrence, C., and Compo, G. P.(1998). “A practical guide to wavelet analysis.” Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 79(1), 61–78.
Tsoukalas, L. H., and Uhrig, R. E. (1996). Fuzzy and neural approaches in engineering. Wiley, New York, 587.
Wilks, D. S. (1995). Statistical methods in the atmospheric sciences an introduction, Academic, San Diego, 467.
Woodhouse, C. A., and Overpeck, J. T.(1998). “2000 years of drought variability in the Central United States.” Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 79(12), 2693–2714.
Zhang, B. L., and Dong, Z. Y.(2001). “An adaptive neural-wavelet model for short term load forecasting.” Electric Power Syst. Res., 59, 121–129.
Zheng, T., Girgis, A. A., and Makram, E. B.(2000). “A hybrid wavelet-Kalman filter method for load forecasting.” Electric Power Syst. Res., 54, 11–17.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 15, 2002
Accepted: May 27, 2003
Published online: Oct 15, 2003
Published in print: Nov 2003
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.