The ability of LSTM to model snowmelt versus rainfall generated floods

Abstract. One of the most important skills of hydrological models is to simulate timing and magnitude of flood events. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are currently among the most successful models for streamflow and flood prediction over large regions. In snow-influenced catchments, which typically comprise a minority in large-scale studies, floods are generated by two distinctly different processes, snowmelt and rainfall. The applicability of hydrological models in such regions is therefore dependent on their ability to represent both types of floods. Nevertheless, flood evaluations of LSTM taking different flood-generating processes into account are currently lacking. This study fills this gap by evaluating the ability of LSTM to model flood peak characteristics separately for snowmelt and rainfall generated floods. The trained LSTM model successfully simulated streamflow time series across the 103 evaluated catchments, with average NSE of 0.85 and average KGE of 0.87 over the unseen evaluation period. LSTM exhibited better performance in the majority of the catchments in terms of flood peak timing and magnitude for both rainfall and snowfall generated floods when compared to the operational hydrological model in the region (HBV) used as a benchmark. Both models had a 24 pp higher percentage of correctly simulated peak days for rainfall generated floods as compared to snowmelt generated floods. LSTM outperformed HBV for a larger proportion of the catchments in terms of peak timing of rainfall generated events (83 %) as compared to snowmelt generated events (64 %). On the other hand, a larger proportion of the catchments were improved by LSTM for snowmelt generated events as compared to rainfall generated events when considering peak magnitudes. The largest improvements in peak magnitudes were found for rainfall generated events, in particular for catchments where HBV exhibited high (> 40 %) absolute errors. Overall, our findings bring confidence that LSTM can improve hydrological services in regions subject to both snowmelt and rainfall generated floods.