Explore Spatio‐Temporal Learning of Large Sample Hydrology Using Graph Neural Networks

Abstract Streamflow forecasting over gauged and ungauged basins play a vital role in water resources planning, especially under the changing climate. Increased availability of large sample hydrology data sets, together with recent advances in deep learning techniques, has presented new opportunities to explore temporal and spatial patterns in hydrological signatures for improving streamflow forecasting. The purpose of this study is to adapt and benchmark several state‐of‐the‐art graph neural network (GNN) architectures, including ChebNet, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), and GraphWaveNet, for end‐to‐end graph learning. We explicitly represent river basins as nodes in a graph, learn the spatiotemporal nodal dependencies, and then use the learned relations to predict streamflow simultaneously across all nodes in the graph. The efficacy of the developed GNN models is investigated using the Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large‐sample Studies (CAMELS) data set under two settings, fixed graph topology (transductive learning), and variable graph topology (inductive learning), with the latter applicable to prediction in ungauged basins (PUB). Results indicate that GNNs are generally robust and computationally efficient, achieving similar or better performance than a baseline model trained using the long short‐term memory (LSTM) network. Further analyses are conducted to interpret the graph learning process at the edge and node levels and to investigate the effect of different model configurations. We conclude that graph learning constitutes a viable machine learning‐based method for aggregating spatiotemporal information from a multitude of sources for streamflow forecasting