Early warning system for floods at estuarine areas: combining artificial intelligence with process-based models

This study proposes a novel combination of artificial intelligence and process-based models to construct a flood early warning system (FEWS) for estuarine regions. Using streamflow and rainfall data, a deep learning model with long short-term memory layers was used to forecast the river discharge at the fluvial boundary of an estuary.

The results demonstrated that the Douro Estuary FEWS is reliable for discharges up to 5000 m3/s, with predictions made 36 h in advance. For values higher than this, the uncertainties in the model predictions increased; however, they were still capable of detecting flood occurrences.