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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-2950</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Technical note: Regional fine-tuning of LSTMs for improved streamflow predictions in ungauged catchments</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Shokri</surname>
<given-names>Ashkan</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4925-7937</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bennett</surname>
<given-names>James C.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4930-2638</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Robertson</surname>
<given-names>David E.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4230-8006</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Clayton 3168, Australia</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>16</day>
<month>06</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>13</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Ashkan Shokri et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2950/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2950/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2950/egusphere-2026-2950.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2950/egusphere-2026-2950.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Predicting streamflow in ungauged basins (PUB) remains a central challenge in hydrology. Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks trained on large samples of catchments (&quot;global&quot; LSTMs) have emerged as a state-of-the-art approach for PUB, outperforming conceptual rainfall&amp;ndash;runoff models with traditional regionalisation approaches. However, global LSTMs are spatially agnostic, relying solely on static catchment attributes to differentiate regional hydrological behaviour. This study introduces Regionalised Fine-Tuning (ReFT), a strategy that adapts a pretrained global LSTM to the region surrounding each ungauged target catchment by fine-tuning on a spatially weighted set of donor catchments using an inverse-distance weighting scheme. ReFT is evaluated on 218 catchments from the CAMELS-AUS dataset under a spatial out-of-sample cross-validation framework, comparing two fine-tuning configurations: updating all model parameters versus updating only the prediction head while keeping the recurrent backbone frozen. ReFT improves Nash&amp;ndash;Sutcliffe Efficiency relative to the base global LSTM in more than 66 % of catchments, with the largest gains occurring for catchments of moderate baseline performance. The ReFT framework combines the broad process generalisation of large-sample deep learning with the local specificity of regional adaptation, providing an efficient route to improved streamflow predictions in data-sparse regions.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="13"/></counts>
</article-meta>
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