Long-term streamflow forecasting for the Cascade Reservoir System of Han River using SWAT with CFS output

Due to the large uncertainties of long-term precipitation prediction and reservoir operation, it is difficult to forecast long-term streamflow for large basins with cascade reservoirs. In this paper, a framework coupling the original Climate Forecasting System (CFS) precipitation with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was proposed to forecast the nine-month streamflow for the Cascade Reservoir System of Han River (CRSHR) including Shiquan, Ankang and Danjiangkou reservoirs. First, CFS precipitation was tested against the observation and post-processed through two machine learning algorithms, random forest and support vector regression. Results showed the correlation coefficients between the monthly areal CFS precipitation (post-processed) and observation were 0.91-0.96, confirming that CFS precipitation post-processing using machine learning was not affected by the extended forecast period. Additionally, two precipitation spatio-temporal distribution models, original CFS and similar historical observation, were adopted to disaggregate the processed monthly areal CFS precipitation to daily subbasin-scale precipitation. Based on the reservoir restoring flow, the regional SWAT was calibrated for CRSHR. The Nash-Sutcliffe efficiencies for three reservoirs flow simulation were 0.86, 0.88 and 0.84, respectively, meeting the accuracy requirement. The experimental forecast showed that for three reservoirs, long-term streamflow forecast with similar historical observed distribution was more accurate than that with original CFS.