Hydrologic Simulations with Artificial Neural Networks

A back-propagation (BP) neural networks model was used for simulating daily streamflows in the upper area of Nangao Reservoir at Shanwei City, Guangdong Province, China. Approaches and techniques of applying the BP model in runoff simulation are presented in this paper. A comparison of the BP model to the Xinanjiang model was also conducted to evaluate the performance of the BP model. The simulated results indicate a satisfactory performance in the streamflow forecasting with the BP model. The study concludes that the BP model has the high practicability and good accuracy for describing complex nonlinear hydrologic processes.