PNNL

Abstract

Contemporary and water resources engineering and management rely increasingly on pattern recognition techniques that have the ability to capitalize on the unrelenting accumulation of data that is made possible by modern information technology and remote sensing methods. In response to the growing information needs of modern water systems, advanced computational models and tools have been devised to identify and extract relevant information from the mass of data that is now available. This chapter presents innovative applications from computational learning science within the fields of hydrology, hydrogeology, hydroclimatology, and water management. The success of machine learning is evident from the growing number of studies involving the application of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Relevance Vector Machines (RVM), and Locally Weighted Projection Regression (LWPR) to address various issues in hydrologic sciences. The applications that will be discussed within the chapter employ the abovementioned machine learning techniques for intelligent modeling of reservoir operations, temporal downscaling of precipitation, spatial downscaling of soil moisture and evapotranspiration, comparisons of various techniques for groundwater quality modeling, and forecasting of chaotic time series behavior. Combinatorial algorithms to capture the intrinsic complexities in the modeled phenomena and to overcome disparate scales are developed; for example, learning machines have been coupled with geostatistical techniques, non-homogenous hidden Markov models, wavelets, and evolutionary computing techniques. This chapter does not intend to be exhaustive; it reviews the progress that has been made over the past decade in the use of learning machines in applied hydrologic sciences and presents a summary of future needs and challenges for further advancement of these methods.