A neural network model for short term river flow prediction

Abstract. This paper presents a model using rain gauge and weather radar data to predict the runoff of a small alpine catchment in Austria. The gapless spatial coverage of the radar is important to detect small convective shower cells, but managing such a huge amount of data is a demanding task for an artificial neural network. The method described here uses statistical analysis to reduce the amount of data and find an appropriate input vector. Based on this analysis, radar measurements (pixels) representing areas requiring approximately the same time to dewater are grouped.