Developing a Machine learning Regional watershed model from individual
Soil and Water Assessment Tool models for western Lake Erie
Abstract
Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is one of the widely used
hydrological models, especially it has been successfully applied for the
assessment of the impact of land use land cover and best management
practices scenarios. But it is less applicable for type of research that
requires integration or optimization with other models since it cannot
update the land-use and best management practice information efficiently
and it should be run separately when results for the multiple watersheds
are needed. These days, the attention on the water security has been
growing and interdisciplinary works desires integration of the
hydrological model with other models are being highlighted. Thus, there
are needs of development of the surrogate model which is computationally
efficient and applicable to multiple watersheds. In this research, we
propose the surrogate model of the SWAT with novel machine learning
techniques such as random forest model. As a first step, the models are
trained with the SWAT data from one watershed, which is a Maumee River
Watersheds. Models for flow, mineral phosphorus, total nitrogen, total
phosphorus, and sediment transport are built separately, and the model
performance was above satisfactory level based on R-squared value,
Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, and percent bias. In addition, the surrogate
models were tested for the different best management practices adoption
scenarios and were trained additional data to make the model valid for
the wide range of the best management practices adoption ratios.
Finally, the surrogate models were expanded to multiple watersheds, by
training SWAT results from Huron River Watersheds and River Raisin and
they evaluated with the R-squared value. High R-squared values indicated
that the surrogate model could be used in place of SWAT.