Estimation of water-use rates based on hydro-meteorological variables using deep belief network

This study proposed a deep learning-based model to estimate stream water-use rate (WUR) using precipitation (P) and potential evapotranspiration (PET). Correlations were explored to identify relationships among accumulated meteorological variables for various time durations (three-, four-, five-, and six-month cumulative) and WUR, which revealed that three-month cumulative meteorological variables and WUR were highly correlated. A deep belief network (DBN) based on iterating parameter tuning was developed to estimate WUR using P, PET, and antecedent stream water-use rate (DWUR). The training and validation periods were 2011–2016, and 2017–2019, respectively. The results showed that the PET-DWUR based model provided better performances in Nash–Sutcliff efficiency (NSE), root mean square error (RMSE), and determination coefficient (R²) than the P-PET-DWUR and P-DWUR models. The framework in this study can provide a forecast model for deficiencies of stream water use coupled with a weather forecast model.