Multivariate multi-step LSTM model for flood runoff prediction: a case study on the Godavari River Basin in India

Abstract Flood is India's most prevalent natural calamity, devastatingly affecting human lives, infrastructure, and agriculture. Predicting floods can help to mitigate the potential damage and conduct timely evacuation drives. This research proposes a deep-learning regression model to forecast flood runoff. Various climatological, hydrological, land, and vegetation-related data have been collected from multiple sources for 18 years (2002–2019) to create a comprehensive dataset for the Godavari River at the Perur water station in India. The relevant attributes identified through feature selection are river water level, precipitation, temperature, surface pressure, evaporation, soil water content, daily runoff, and average river flow. The selected features were fed into various time series prediction models like AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Prophet, Neural Prophet, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The LSTM model obtained the best results achieving a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) value of 0.05, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) value of 0.007, Willmott's Index (WI) of 0.83, Legates-McCabe's Index (LMI) of 0.58, and R2 of 0.67 for a 1-day prediction with a look-back window of 183 days. The model is also trained to predict the flood runoff value for a week ahead. The proposed model can serve as an essential component in flood warning systems.