Premium
Upskilling Low‐Fidelity Hydrodynamic Models of Flood Inundation Through Spatial Analysis and Gaussian Process Learning
Author(s) -
Fraehr Niels,
Wang Quan J.,
Wu Wenyan,
Nathan Rory
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1029/2022wr032248
Subject(s) - fidelity , surrogate model , flood myth , computer science , gaussian process , kriging , curse of dimensionality , lasso (programming language) , process (computing) , gaussian , data mining , machine learning , artificial intelligence , telecommunications , world wide web , operating system , physics , quantum mechanics , philosophy , theology
Abstract Accurate flood inundation modeling using a complex high‐resolution hydrodynamic (high‐fidelity) model can be very computationally demanding. To address this issue, efficient approximation methods (surrogate models) have been developed. Despite recent developments, there remain significant challenges in using surrogate methods for modeling the dynamical behavior of flood inundation in an efficient manner. Most methods focus on estimating the maximum flood extent due to the high spatial‐temporal dimensionality of the data. This study presents a hybrid surrogate model, consisting of a low‐resolution hydrodynamic (low‐fidelity) and a Sparse Gaussian Process (Sparse GP) model, to capture the dynamic evolution of the flood extent. The low‐fidelity model is computationally efficient but has reduced accuracy compared to a high‐fidelity model. To account for the reduced accuracy, a Sparse GP model is used to correct the low‐fidelity modeling results. To address the challenges posed by the high dimensionality of the data from the low‐ and high‐fidelity models, Empirical Orthogonal Functions analysis is applied to reduce the spatial‐temporal data into a few key features. This enables training of the Sparse GP model to predict high‐fidelity flood data from low‐fidelity flood data, so that the hybrid surrogate model can accurately simulate the dynamic flood extent without using a high‐fidelity model. The hybrid surrogate model is validated on the flat and complex Chowilla floodplain in Australia. The hybrid model was found to improve the results significantly compared to just using the low‐fidelity model and incurred only 39% of the computational cost of a high‐fidelity model.