Evaluating the capability of hybrid data-driven approaches to forecast monthly streamflow using hydrometric and meteorological variables

Streamflow forecasting, as one of the most important issues in hydrological studies, plays a vital role in several aspects of water resources management such as reservoir operation, water allocation, and flood forecasting. In this study, wavelet-gene expression programming (WGEP) and wavelet-M5 prime (WM5P) techniques, as two robust artificial intelligence (AI) models, were applied for forecasting the monthly streamflow in Khoshkroud and Polroud Rivers located in two basins with the same names. Results of hybrid AI techniques were compared with those achieved by two stand-alone models of GEP and M5P. Seven combinations of hydrological (H) and meteorological (M) variables were considered to investigate the effect of climatic variables on the performance of the proposed techniques. Moreover, the performance of both stand-alone and hybrid models were evaluated by statistical criteria of correlation of coefficient, root-mean-square error, index of agreement, the Nash-Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficient, and relative improvement. The statistical results revealed that there is a dependency between 'the M5P and GEP performance' and 'the geometric properties of basins (e.g., area, shape, slope, and river network density)'. It was found that a preprocessed technique could increase the performance of M5P and GEP models. Compared to the stand-alone techniques, the hybrid AI models resulted in higher performance. For both basins, the performance of the WM5P model was higher than the WGEP model, especially for extreme events. Overall, the results demonstrated that the proposed hybrid AI approaches are reliable tools for forecasting the monthly streamflow, while the meteorological and hydrometric variables are taken into account.