SUMMARY
Consistent streamflow forecasts play a fundamental part in flood risk mitigation. Population increase and water cycle intensification are extending not only globally but also among Pakistan’s water resources. The frequency of floods has increased in the last few decades in the country, which emphasizes the importance of efficient practices needed to adopt for various aspects of water resource management such as reservoir scheduling, water sustainability, and water supply. The purpose of this study is to develop a novel hybrid model for streamflow forecasting and validate its efficiency at the upper Indus basin (UIB), Pakistan. Maximum streamflow in the River Indus from its upper mountain basin results from melting snow or glaciers and climatic unevenness of both precipitation and temperature inputs, which will, therefore, affect rural livelihoods at both a local and a regional scale through effects on runoff in the Upper Indus basin (UIB). This indicates that basins receive the bulk of snowfall input to sustain the glacier system. The present study will help find the runoff from high altitude catchments and estimated flood occurrence for the proposed and constructed hydropower projects of the Upper Indus basin (UIB). Due to climate variability, the upper Indus basin (UIB) was further divided into three zone named as sub-zones, zone one (z1), zone two (z2), and zone three (z3). The hybrid models are designed by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) models, which includes Feedforward backpropagation (FFBP) and Radial basis function (RBF) with decomposition methods. This includes a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD). On the basis of the autocorrelation function and the cross-correlation function of streamflow, precipitation and temperature inputs are selected for all developed models. Data have been analyzed by comparing the simulation outputs of the models with a correlation coefficient (R), root mean square errors (RMSE), Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean absolute errors (MAE). The proposed hybrid models have been applied to monthly streamflow observations from three hydrological stations and 17 meteorological stations in the UIB. The results show that the prediction accuracy of the decomposition-based models is usually better than those of AI-based models. Among the DWT and EEMD based hybrid model, EEMD has performed significantly well when compared to all other hybrid and individual AI models. The peak value analysis is also performed to confirm the results’ precision rate during the flood season (May-October). The detailed comparative analysis showed that the RBFNN integrated with EEMD has better forecasting capabilities as compared to other developed models and EEMD-RBF can capture the nonlinear characteristics of the streamflow time series during the flood season with more precision.