Detailed Record



Graph neural network for groundwater level forecasting


Abstract Accurate prediction of groundwater level (GWL) over a period of time is of great importance for groundwater resources management. Machine learning techniques due to their great performance have recently been used for this problem. Previous methods, however, did not consider the spatial relationships between wells due to the difficulty to handle unstructured well location data. In this paper, a graph neural network (GNN) is used to forecast groundwater dynamics where it can represent each well as a node in the graph. The spatial information is, thus, extracted from an interconnected network using graph convolution layers with a self-adaptive adjacency matrix. The temporal features of the sequence are obtained by gated temporal convolutional networks. The model was applied and evaluated for wells in the southwest area of British Colombia in Canada using data about 11 years (2010–2020). The proposed model performs better in terms of all the defined evaluation metrics, when compared with two baseline models: long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent units (GRU). Moreover, when the spatial dependencies are completely unknown, the model can still learn them from the data and obtain comparable performance. Furthermore, the proposed model has a high efficiency since it can simultaneously model GWL change for all monitoring wells in the system. We also demonstrated that the spatial dependencies between each well could be intuitively interpreted from the learned adjacency matrix.
Authors Bangyi Tao University of WyomingORCID , Pejman Tahmasebi ORCID
Journal Info Elsevier BV | Journal of Hydrology , vol: 616 , pages: 128792 - 128792
Publication Date 1/1/2023
ISSN 0022-1694
TypeKeyword Image article
Open Access closed Closed Access
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2022.128792
KeywordsKeyword Image Groundwater Level Forecasting (Score: 0.677815) , Rainfall-Runoff Modeling (Score: 0.547475) , Watershed Simulation (Score: 0.539503) , Groundwater Flow (Score: 0.534833) , Hydrological Modeling (Score: 0.528633)