Leveraging Advanced Data-Driven Approaches to Forecast Daily Floods Based on Rainfall for Proactive Prevention Strategies in Saudi Arabia

Leveraging Advanced Data-Driven Approaches to Forecast Daily Floods Based on Rainfall for Proactive Prevention Strategies in Saudi Arabia

Accurate flood forecasts are imperative to supervise and prepare for extreme events to assess the risks and develop proactive prevention strategies. The flood time-series data exhibit both spatial and temporal structures and make it challenging for the models to fully capture the embedded features due to their complex stochastic nature. This paper proposed a new approach for the first time using variational mode decomposition (VMD) hybridized with Gaussian process regression (GPR) to design the VMD-GPR model for daily flood forecasting. First, the VMD model decomposed the (t − 1) lag into several signals called intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The VMD has the ability to improve noise robustness, better mode separation, reduced mode aliasing, and end effects. Then, the partial auto-correlation function (PACF) was applied to determine the significant lag (t − 1). Finally, the PACF-based decomposed IMFs were sent into the GPR to forecast the daily flood index at (t − 1) for Jeddah and Jazan stations in Saudi Arabia. The long short-term memory (LSTM) boosted regression tree (BRT) and cascaded forward neural network (CFNN) models were combined with VMD to compare along with the standalone versions. The proposed VMD-GPR outperformed the comparing model to forecast daily floods for both stations using a set of performance metrics. The VMD-GPR outperformed comparing models by achieving R = 0.9825, RMSE = 0.0745, MAE = 0.0088, ENS = 0.9651, KGE = 0.9802, IA = 0.9911, U95% = 0.2065 for Jeddah station, and R = 0.9891, RMSE = 0.0945, MAE = 0.0189, ENS = 0.9781, KGE = 0.9849, IA = 0.9945, U95% = 0.2621 for Jazan station. The proposed VMD-GPR method efficiently analyzes flood events to forecast in these two stations to facilitate flood forecasting for disaster mitigation and enable the efficient use of water resources. The VMD-GPR model can help policymakers in strategic planning flood management to undertake mandatory risk mitigation measures.