A Comprehensive Review of Deep Learning Applications in Hydrology and Water

Resources
Muhammed Sit, Bekir Z. Demiray, Zhongrun Xiang, Gregory J. Ewing, Yusuf Sermet, Ibrahim
Demir

Abstract
The global volume of digital data is expected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. The volume,
variety, and velocity of water-related data are increasing due to large-scale sensor networks and
increased attention to topics such as disaster response, water resources management, and climate
change. Combined with the growing availability of computational resources and popularity of
deep learning, these data are transformed into actionable and practical knowledge,
revolutionizing the water industry. In this article, a systematic review of literature is conducted to
identify existing research which incorporates deep learning methods in the water sector, with
regard to monitoring, management, governance and communication of water resources. The
study provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art deep learning approaches used in the
water industry for generation, prediction, enhancement, and classification tasks, and serves as a
guide for how to utilize available deep learning methods for future water resources challenges.
Key issues and challenges in the application of these techniques in the water domain are
discussed, including the ethics of these technologies for decision-making in water resources
management and governance. Finally, we provide recommendations and future directions for the
application of deep learning models in hydrology and water resources.

This paper is a pre-print submitted to arxiv.

Introduction
The global volume of digital data is expected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025 (Reinsel et al.,
2018). Large-scale sensor networks as well as the increased awareness of climate change, water
resources management, and the monitoring of water-related hazards led to the substantial growth
of the volume, variety, and velocity of water-related data (Weber et al., 2018; Sit et al., 2019).
Modern data collection techniques, including satellite hydrology, internet of things for on-site
measurements (Kruger et al., 2016), and crowdsourcing tools (Sermet et al., 2020b), has
revolutionized the water science and industry as approached by the government, academia, and
private sector (Krajewski et al., 2016). The effective utilization of vast water data holds the key
for long-term sustainability and resilience and presents opportunities to transform water
governance for the upcoming decades (Grossman et al., 2015). In the hydrological domain,
multivariate analysis relying on extensive and semantically-connected data resources is required
to generate actionable knowledge and produce realistic and beneficial solutions to water
challenges facing communities (Jadidoleslam et al., 2019; Carson et al., 2018). However, the
inaccessible, unstructured, nonstandardized, and incompatible nature of the data makes
optimized data models (Demir and Szczepanek, 2017) and smarter analytics approaches a
necessity (Sermet and Demir, 2018a).

Computerized methods to create an understanding of hydrological phenomena are based on

various modeling strategies, which simplify a hydrological system to simulate its behavior
(Antonetti and Zappa, 2018). Physical models aim to achieve this goal by specifically designing
complex simulations that are powered by mathematical and numeric specifications of
conceptualized physical characteristics (Jaiswal et al., 2020). However, hydrological systems, as
is the case with other natural systems, are inherently heterogeneous (Marçais and De Dreuzy,
2017) as opposed to less complex human-made systems with defined rules. Therefore physical
models, though are deterministic and reliable, do not always perform and scale well due to their
intrinsic limitations (Islam, 2011). As an alternative, statistical models have been employed to
make use of the comprehensive set of available hydrological, environmental, and geophysical
data (Evora and Coulibaly, 2009). These approaches assume minimum awareness of the
underlying mechanism and receive their strength by eliciting useful information and patterns
from the available data through statistical analysis (McCuen, 2016). However, they have
displayed shortcomings in terms of accuracy and certainty, and also require excessive
computational power (Ardabili et al., 2019; Agliamzanov et al., 2020).

Recent developments in artificial intelligence and graphical processor units (GPU) have paved
the way for deep learning, a pioneering approach that is fueled by multilayer artificial neural
networks (LeCun et al., 2015). Deep learning provides a black-box method to learn from
complex and high-dimensional data to infer robust and scalable insights while minimizing the
degree to which manual labor is needed (Sengupta et al., 2020). One feature which separates
deep learning from its superset machine learning is the use of multilayer models which leads to a
higher-level representation of the underlying data sources (Saba et al., 2019). Furthermore, deep
learning is capable of extracting substantial features without being explicitly instructed, and thus,
is more immune to raw and noisy data (Sahiner et al., 2019). Successful implementations of deep
learning permeate numerous domains and industries including medical imaging (Haskins et al.,
2020), healthcare (Esteva et al., 2019), finance (Heaton et al., 2017), geophysical sciences (Shen,
2018), remote sensing (Ma et al., 2019), and hydrology. Due to its significant adoption rate and
potential to be applicable to any domain which encompasses problems that can be expressed as
control systems, numerous open-source and for-profit software tools, educational resources, and
generalized algorithms have been made available for use, opening up countless paths to advance
hydrological studies.

This paper presents a systematic review of applications of deep learning within the scope of the
hydrological domain. The literature has been thoroughly examined to identify the use cases of
deep learning in the subfields of the water sector including flooding, weather, land use and soil,
water quality, surface water, water resources, and groundwater. Each study has been evaluated to
extract information that is scientifically relevant to assess the study’s contribution and
reproducibility including the hydrological tasks that were taken on to be approached by deep
learning along with the utilized network architectures, datasets, software tools and frameworks,
licenses, and deep learning practices and algorithms. The paper explores modern deep learning
networks from the lens of the hydrological domain to investigate the shortcomings and
challenges of the status quo and to highlight the opportunities and future directions to serve as a
guide to researchers, professionals, and governmental organizations in the water sector.

The major contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows. Though there are various
configurations of artificial neural networks optimized for various data types and use cases, it is
challenging to reduce a real-life hydrological task to a certain predefined approach given the
depth and complexity of the tasks as well as the diversity of networks. The methodologies that
need to be employed while developing deep learning-powered solutions in hydrology are not
standardized in terms of data quality and preparation, execution, validation, and documentation.
Furthermore, the strength, usability, and reliability of a model lie on clearly set descriptions and
procedures for deterministic reproducibility, given the variety of development frameworks as
well as the application areas. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been a thorough
investigation of systematically approaching water challenges with deep learning. Thus, this paper
serves as a meticulous guide for the stakeholders of the hydrology domain to advance the water
industry with intelligent systems that are revolutionized by multi-faceted data (Sermet et al.,
2020a).

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Literature Review section provides the
review methodology followed by a comprehensive literature review of deep learning applications
in the water domain. Descriptions of deep learning concepts, tasks, and architectures are
described to summarize the available methodology for use by the hydrological community.
Results section presents a detailed summary and analysis of reviewed papers grouped by their
application area. Key Issues and Challenges section highlights the key issues and challenges
facing the stakeholders utilizing deep learning in the water domain with respect to technical
limitations as well as ethical considerations. Recommendations and Conclusions section outlines
a vision entailing the adoption of prominent and deep learning-powered technologies to solve the
water challenges of the future and then, concludes the paper with a concise summary of findings.

Literature Review
This section starts with a detailed description of the literature search methodology in the first
subsection Review Methodology and then presents the information extracted from each reviewed
manuscript. The subsection Deep Learning gives a brief overview of deep learning history,
describes various neural network architectures, and elaborates on different machine learning task
types. At the end of this section we share the summary of the literature as figures to provide an
understanding of this review and a table of all the papers reviewed.

Review Methodology
A systematic literature search on water domain was employed for this review. Web of Science,
Scopus, Springer Link, Wiley Online Library and The International Water Association
Publishing Online were used as the databases and the keywords included "deep neural network",
"deep neural networks", "deep learning", "lstm", "long short term memory", "cnn",
"convolutional", "gan", "generative adversarial", "rnn", "recurrent neural", "gru" and "gated
recurrent". After limiting the search with these keywords in publication title, abstract or
keywords, an additional exclusion criterion was applied through each database’s categorization
system if applicable only to include the publications within the environmental fields. Also,
searches were limited to only include journal publications. All articles published in 2018, 2019
and 2020 up until the end of March containing these keywords in their titles, keyword fields or
abstracts were included in the first list of articles gathered. This time interval is primarily chosen
based on our initial literature search and availability of deep learning application papers enough
to create a comprehensive review and curate insights within the water domain between 2018 to
2020. There were also other review articles partially covering the water domain and timeline
(Shen, 2018).
After gathering the initial list totaling 1515 publications, each of them was briefly reviewed to
determine whether they were in alignment with the scope of this study. All publications that are
not research papers were excluded, namely vision papers, editorials and review papers. From the
initial list of 1515 publications, 315 remained after this filtering step. These publications were
filtered further to keep publications that met certain technical criteria. This step eliminated all
publications that did not involve some form of deep artificial neural network in their pipeline of
work.

After this step 129 publications remained and were included in our comprehensive review. The
comprehensive review process consisted of manually reviewing the papers one by one to extract
specific publication features, including: Architecture, Framework/Library/Programming
Language, Dataset, Source Code Sharing, Reproducibility, Subfield: Deep Learning, Subfield:
Environment, Summary. Each of the feature categories are described below:

● Architecture – The type of deep neural network architecture(s) employed in the study.
This could be simply Artificial Neural Network (ANN) or more complex architectures
like Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) or Autoencoders (VAE).
● Framework/Library – This column serves as a survey within the field to understand the
programming language and numeric computation library choices of researchers.
● Dataset – Whether the dataset(s) used in the study were collected specifically for the
study, acquired from an authority resource, or previously existing standalone.
● Source Code Sharing – A boolean field indicating if the code of the study is open
sourced and accessible by the public.
● Reproducibility – A boolean field indicating if the results of the study could be
reproduced just by using the information provided in the manuscript.
● Subfield: Deep Learning – A classification of the machine learning task tackled in the
paper. This field uses one of the following values; Regression, Classification, Sequence
Prediction, Matrix Prediction, Unsupervised Learning and, Reinforcement Learning.
Details of these are given in the next subsection where we describe deep learning
practices.
● Subfield: Environment – A classification of the task carried out in an environmental
field. This field uses one of the following values; Flood, Groundwater, Land Usage and
Soil, Surface Water, Water Quality, Water Resources Management, Weather and, Others.
Others include papers within the environmental field but do not exactly fit with other
subfields we included here.
● Summary – The brief summary of the study.

These data for each publication reviewed herein are shared later in this section with figures and a
table. Technical summaries of the papers reviewed are given in the Results section. Conclusions
drawn from the acquired data are shared in the Key Issues and Challenges section.

Deep Learning
Deep Learning is a subfield of Machine Learning where a long-known algorithm, an artificial
neural network (ANN) is used to map features into an output or a set of outputs. Formed by an
input layer, intermediate hidden layers and an output layer, ANNs present an efficient way to
learn linear and non-linear relationships between input and output pairs. Neural networks, when
formed by many stacked layers, can represent complex features in later layers by using simpler
representations formed by earlier layers in the network (Goodfellow et al., 2016). Each layer
within an ANN comprises at least a neuron. ANN is a network of these neurons connected to
each other with some weights and these neurons run specific functions, namely activation
functions, mapping it’s input to an output. Stacked on top of each other, the series of functions
runs over the input of the network, translates the input to the output in the output layer.
Typically, each neuron within a layer runs the same activation function and type of the layer is
determined by this activation function. Network type is determined by the combination of layers
used and how neurons are connected to each other within and between layers. The quintessential
form of an ANN is the multilayer perceptron (MLP). An MLP contains at least a single hidden
layer while each neuron within the network is connected to every neuron within the next layer.
This architecture forms a fully connected neural network.

An activation function in a typical MLP multiplies the input by a weight and outputs it to the
next neuron in line. In modern neural networks the common (Goodfellow et al., 2016) and
recommended (Nair and Hinton, 2010) activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU)
function which introduces non-linearity to the network. A hidden layer that applies ReLU to the
input could be referred as ReLU layer or an activation layer using ReLU. ANNs are generally
trained using the backpropagation (BP) algorithm (Rummelhart et al., 1986) to fit the network to
the set of input-output pairs using a loss function. A loss function or a cost function is used to
determine how successful the mapping is done by a model. An easy and go-to loss function is
mean squared error (MSE) which computes the difference between an output of the ANN and the
ground truth for each input-output sample, squares the difference to avoid negative values and
computes the mean error of all the samples. BP trains an ANN using the loss function by
computing the gradient of the loss function with respect to the weights between neurons and
updates the weights to better fit the data samples in order to minimize the loss function.

Figure 1. A densely connected artificial neural network architecture

ANNs are not a new concept, considering primitive versions were around in the 1940s
(Goodfellow et al., 2016). Instead, ANNs attracted attention of researchers from various
scientific disciplines when it became clear that they are extremely powerful in capturing
representations in the data and with advances in graphics processing units (GPUs) which enable
extremely fast matrix operations (Goodfellow et al., 2016). In this way, a neural network
architecture that previously was infeasible to utilize due to time complexity as the number of
hidden layers increased, could be used in training on complex datasets learning representations.

For each of the reviewed papers we identify the machine learning subfield, which correspond to
task types. Task types are defined by the output form of a network. We consider the following as
distinct task types: Regression, Classification, Sequence Prediction, Matrix Prediction,
Unsupervised Learning, and Reinforcement Learning. These task types are briefly discussed
below:

● Regression – A machine learning task that predicts a continuous value. Forecasting the next
measurement from a series of measurements would be an example of a regression task.
● Classification – When the aim of a model is to predict whether the set of inputs can be
categorized into some classes, the task is a classification task. The number of classes are not
limited. Predicting whether the next day will be a dry or wet one is a classification task.
● Sequence Prediction – Regression of a sequence of numeric values or a vector. Forecasting
the next 24 hours of measurements for a stream sensor is a sequence prediction task.
● Matrix Prediction – Regression of a matrix of numeric values. Forecasting the next
precipitation measurements for a rectangular region would be a matrix prediction task. Each
of the values in the predicted matrix would be the precipitation value of a subregion within
the actual region.
● Unsupervised Learning – A learning task applying competitive learning instead of error
correction learning like previous task types. Decreasing dimension of a high-dimensional
hydrological input data to lower-dimension visualizable data would be an example.
● Reinforcement Learning – A learning task where the output is unspecified. In a
reinforcement learning task, the algorithm tries to find the optimal solution for any given
input using a reward/penalty policy and a try-error mechanism. An example of a
reinforcement learning task is an AI model that learns when to release water from a dam.

Architectures
This subsection summarizes cornerstone neural network architectures used by papers reviewed in
this study. Also, some ANN concepts are briefly discussed. For further understanding of these
architectures, we refer readers to the cited works.

Figure 2. A basic convolutional neural network structure for image classification

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)
A CNN (LeCun, 1989) or a ConvNet comprises at least one convolutional layer, which
methodologically expects a 3D tensor as the input. A convolutional layer applies multiple
cascaded convolution kernels to extract intricate knowledge from the input. For example, a CNN
for an RGB image tensor with a shape of image width x image height x 3 would have a
convolutional layer which applies 3 different convolution operations with 3 separate kernels to
each of the color channel matrices. Using a convolution kernel matrix, a convolutional layer that
processes an image as such can extract 2D positional information from images, such as
understanding objects that are close to each other.

To make a neural network with a convolutional layer cognize non-linear correlations between the
input and output along with linear correlations, one needs to introduce non-linearity to the
network via an activation layer. Typically, that is done by using the Rectified Linear Unit
(ReLU) as the activation function following the convolution layer. Another common layer used
within a CNN is a pooling layer. A pooling layer is used to reduce the size of the input while
keeping the positional knowledge intact. A frequently used pooling method within CNN
literature is Max Pooling (Zhou and Chellappa, 1988). This sample-based discretization moves
the most important learnt features to subsequent layers while reducing the size. Consequently,
CNNs make good architectures for deep learning tasks with images or image-like objects as
inputs. This ability of CNNs makes way for various breakthroughs in the fields of object
detection, super-resolution, image classification, and computer vision.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

GANs (Goodfellow et al., 2014) consist of two seemingly separate CNNs working in unison and
competing in a min-max game. One of these CNNs, the generator, aims to generate fake
examples out of a dataset while the other, discriminator, aims to reveal whether its input is fake
or not. Since they try to beat each other, it causes them to get better over time in both generating
fake outputs and discriminating fake from real.

GANs are initially used as generative models, as in randomly generating new samples from a
dataset to appear as if they are from the originating dataset when visualized (Gautam et al.,
2020). They achieve this goal by mapping random noise to real samples from the given dataset,
and then they generate new instances from new random noise tensors. Despite their success at
generation, GANs are also capable of learning translation tasks such as super-resolution
(Demiray et al., 2020) or image to image translation (Isola et al., 2017).
 Figure 3. Overview of generative adversarial networks

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)

RNNs (Pollack, 1990) are a type of artificial neural network that includes a recurrent layer. The
difference of a recurrent layer from a regular fully-connected hidden layer is that neurons within
a recurrent layer could be connected to each other as well. In other words, the output of a neuron
is conveyed both to the neuron(s) within the next layer and to the next neuron within the same
layer. Using this mechanism, RNNs can carry information learned within a neuron to the next
neuron in the same layer.

Figure 4. Connections of a Recurrent layer

This procedure becomes convenient when the data to be fed to the network is in sequential nature
such as a time-series data or a text. When training a model over a data sample like a text to
extract the meaning, most of the time, the beginning of the text could change the meaning that is
to be extracted from the end of the text. RNNs aim to keep the information gained from earlier
parts of a data sample in the memory and move it to the later parts of the same data sample to
ensure better knowledge discovery (Goodfellow et al., 2016). A simple RNN implementation
lacks the practicality in long sequences, such as long paragraphs, as it is common to encounter
the vanishing gradient problem while training (Bengio et al., 1993). With the vanishing gradient
problem, the gradients of the loss function get extremely high in some cases during training and
consequently make the training process and the trained network deficient (Goodfellow et al.,
2016). More complex RNN implementations like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)
(Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997) Networks or Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Networks (Cho
et al., 2014) solve this problem but have greater computational complexity. Various RNN
structures can be used for tasks that somewhat rely on sequential understanding of datasets such
as language modeling (Sundermeyer et al., 2012), text classification (Yin et al., 2017; Sit et al.,
2019) and time-series forecasting (Xiang and Demir, 2020; Sit and Demir 2019).

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks

LSTM (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997) Networks are developed for longer short term
memory life over the input, paving the way for more efficient but more resource intensive
training over datasets consisting of sequential samples. Instead of an activation function
producing one output and carrying the output to immediate neurons both in the next layer and the
same layer, LSTM neurons produce two different values yielded by a series of activations and
operations. While both outputs are kept within the LSTM layer to keep track of things learnt over
the past part of the sequence, one of the outputs is transferred to the next layer (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Computation-wise comparison of RNN, LSTM and GRU nodes

Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Networks

Although LSTM Networks, most of the time, solve the vanishing gradients problem and helped
many breakthroughs within the fields of Natural Language Processing and time-series prediction,
their time complexity emerges as a downside. GRU (Cho et al., 2014) networks reduce the
complexity while keeping the efficacy intact. Similar to a simple RNN neuron, a GRU neuron
produces only one output after a series of computations and uses the same output to convey
important features learnt to both the next layer and the next neuron within the same layer.
 Figure 6. An Elman Network architecture with two input and two output neurons

Nonlinear Autoregressive (NAR) Models

A NAR model is not necessarily a neural network model but a model that is used for time-series
prediction, taking into account both current and previous samples from a time-series to map
input sequence to outputs. A NAR model needs a nonlinear function such as a polynomial
function or a neural network to perform training. If a neural network is used, a NAR network
would classify as an RNN based on the fact that it utilizes sequential complexion of the given
input. Papers reviewed within this study that employ NAR, thus, implement a neural network as
the function in their proposed models. There are many NAR variations and one that deserves
mention, due to cardinality of papers reviewed in this study which employ it, is the Nonlinear
Autoregressive Exogenous Model (NARX) (Lin et al., 1996). NARX is an RNN implementation
that takes advantage of exogenous inputs, hence the name.

Elman Network (ENN)

An Elman Network (Elman, 1990) is yet another RNN implementation that has three layers, only
one being a hidden layer. The hidden layer of the Elman Network is connected to a set of
neurons called context units. In each iteration after the first one over the network, the state of the
hidden layer is copied into the context units. Thus, the state of the network for the previous
sample in the data stream is kept in the network each time to be used in next iterations. An
Elman Network can train over sequential datasets better than a regular ANN due to this
mechanism acting like a memory.

Autoencoders (AE)
Autoencoders (Rummelhart et al., 1985) are neural networks that are used to reduce the
dimensionality of datasets. They are implemented in an unsupervised fashion to generate only a
representation of the dataset within their hidden layer neurons, also called the latent vector.
Taking the same set of values for both input and output of the network, an AE learns to reduce a
dataset into a representation state and additionally learns how to reconstruct the data sample to
its original form from the learned representation.
 Figure 7. Visualization of an Autoencoder network

Deep Q Networks (DQN)

DQN (Mnih et al., 2013) is a reinforcement learning algorithm in which there is a predetermined
rewarding policy. The DQN works similarly to the Q-Learning algorithm which works by
providing a medium for the agent and the environment and tries to maximize the rewards the
agent gets through its actions in the environment. A DQN differentiates from the conventional
Q-Learning algorithm with how it generalizes. In other words, the agent in the Q-Learning
algorithm cannot estimate the outcome from action-environment pairs it didn’t see before, while
in DQN the agent is able to produce a reinforced action.

Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and Deep Belief Networks (DBNs)

RBMs (Hinton, 2002) present two-layer stochastic generative models that are in the shape of
bipartite graphs. RBMs form the building block for deep belief networks (DBN) (Hinton, 2009),
but they can also be used as standalone models. RBMs were initially used in unsupervised tasks,
they also enable the user to tackle classification and regression tasks by implementing them
within other networks. The paper reviewed in this study that employs RBMs uses it in a setting
where RBMs are followed by a set of fully-connected layers in order to perform a classification
task. Formed by stacked RBMs, DBNs, similarly to RBMs, could also be used to tackle many
types of tasks by training unsupervised beforehand. The bipartite connections of RBMs are
altered when they are stacked onto each other to form a DBN (Figure 8). Only the top two layers
of a DBN have bipartite connections while the rest of the layers have one-way connections with
each other. Though RBMs are useful for many tasks, their use in research is decreasing in the
machine learning field as researchers adopt newer architectures that could be utilized in the same
fashion such as AE, DBNs and GANs.
 Figure 8. RBM and DBN examples

Extreme Learning Machines (ELM)

Extreme Learning Machines (Huang et al., 2006) are three-layer neural networks in which the
weights connecting to the second layer from the input layer are randomized, and the weights
connecting to the third are trained. ELM networks have been criticized for being unoriginal
(Wang and Wan, 2008).

Summary of Articles
This subsection presents visual summaries of the reviewed papers as well as a summary table
extracted information from each paper that received comprehensive review. As previously stated,
information from a total of 129 papers are given, however data points in shared figures do not
always equal to this value depending on the data column. This is due to some data columns
storing multiple values at the same time, and in some cases, papers not including the relevant
data.

Among the reviewed papers, as in the deep learning literature, most used architectures are CNNs
and LSTMs (Figure 9). We explain this aspect with their respective success in matrix prediction
and sequence prediction, tasks that have high importance in hydrologic modelling. One
confounding thing is that even though LSTM networks were vastly employed, one architecture
that yields similar performance, GRU networks did not find significant usage in the field.
Additionally, we found it surprising that even though most of the studies reviewed here tackles
tasks involving sequential data, Transformers were not employed by any of the studies we
reviewed. It should be noted that a Transformer is a neural network architecture that is vastly
used in the field of natural language processing, which is another field that focuses on sequential
data.
 Figure 9. Architectures described in the study and their usage in reviewed papers

As the utilization of deep learning in the water field in a broad sense increases over time (Figure
10), annual usage of the deep neural network architectures increases. Figure 11 shows the change
in usage through March 2020 and also presents projections for the rest of the year built on top of
the number of publications through March 2020. We expect to see growth in the usage of neural
network architectures that have been widely used in other disciplines but not in the water field
like DQNs and GANs.

Figure 10. Average number of papers published each month during 2018, 2019 and 2020 January
to March

The datasets used in publications reviewed typically are datasets acquired from authorities or
governmental agencies (Figure 12). Even though in deep learning literature, the dataset
acquisition primarily done by using previously existing datasets, in the water field, on the
contrary, this does not seem to be the case. Code accessibility of the papers is another aspect of
the studies published in the water field that differentiates it from the deep learning field in
general. Although open-sourced models are widely expected from deep learning researchers,
open-sourcing the software built for a study is unusual for a publication in the water field if not
rare, as it can be seen in Table 1. Cumulating from both the data acquisition type and code
accessibility, reproducing the outcomes of a papers does not seem to be an easy task for the
authorities and other researchers in the field.

Figure 11. Architectures described and their annual usage in reviewed papers
Owing to the fact that the field of hydrology vastly relies on sequential data, most studies seem
to work on sequence prediction and regression tasks (Figure 13). This phenomenon also might be
linked with the fact that most of the studies reviewed were classified in Flood subdomain (Figure
14). Figure 15 summarizes the usage of numerical computing frameworks. Even though
TensorFlow seems to be the first choice among water domain researchers, it should be noted that
most of the usage comes from Keras, the second most used framework, which typically works on
top of TensorFlow by providing a higher-level interface. Thus, our inference is that Keras is the
most used deep learning framework within the water field. In contrast, libraries like PyTorch that
is highly endorsed in deep learning literature find a smaller place to themselves.

Figure 12. Distribution of dataset acquisition types in reviewed papers

Figure 13. Histogram of machine learning task types studied in reviewed papers

Figure 14. Histogram of Water domain subfields studied in reviewed papers

 Figure 15. ML frameworks described in the study and their usage in reviewed papers

Table 1. Reviewed papers with curated data points

Network Open
Paper Framework Dataset Reproducible DL Task Water Field
Type Source
Sequence
Yuan et al., 2018 LSTM MATLAB Acquired No No Flood
Prediction
Di Zhang et al., Sequence
LSTM - Acquired No No Flood
2018 Prediction
Kratzert et al., Keras, Sequence
LSTM Existing No Yes Flood
2018 TensorFlow Prediction
ANN, Sequence
X. He et al., 2019 - Acquired No Yes Flood
DBN Prediction
Hu et al., 2019 LSTM - Acquired No No Regression Flood
J.H. Wang et al., Sequence
CNN - Acquired No No Flood
2019 Prediction
S. Yang et al., NAR, Keras,
Acquired No No Regression Flood
2019 LSTM TensorFlow
Sankaranarayanan
ANN Keras Acquired No No Classification Flood
et al., 2019
LSTM, Sequence Flood,
Ni et al., 2019 - Acquired No No
CNN Prediction Weather
LSTM, Sequence
Bai et al., 2019 - Acquired No No Flood
AE Prediction
T. Yang et al.,
LSTM - Acquired No No Regression Flood
2019
Bhola et al., 2019 CNN - Collected No No Segmentation Flood
Damavandi et al., Keras, Sequence
LSTM Acquired No Yes Flood
2019 TensorFlow Prediction
Moy de Vitry et Matrix
CNN TensorFlow Collected Yes Yes Flood
al., 2019 Prediction
Worland et al., Keras,
ANN Acquired No No Regression Flood
2019 TensorFlow
Kratzert et al., Sequence
LSTM PyTorch Acquired Yes Yes Flood
2019a Prediction
RNN, Sequence
Kumar et al., 2019 Keras Acquired No Yes Flood
LSTM Prediction
Sequence
Wan et al., 2019 ENN - Acquired No No Flood
Prediction
Sequence
Qin et al., 2019 LSTM TensorFlow Acquired No No Flood
Prediction
Kratzert et al.,
LSTM PyTorch Existing Yes Yes Regression Flood
2019b
D.T. Bui et al.,
ANN MATLAB Acquired No No Classification Flood
2020
Nguyen and Bae, Sequence
LSTM TensorFlow Acquired No No Flood
2020 Prediction
Q.T. Bui et al.,
ANN - Acquired No No Classification Flood
2020
Sequence
Kabir et al., 2020 DBN TensorFlow Acquired No No Flood
Prediction
Sequence
Kao et al., 2020 LSTM Keras Acquired No No Flood
Prediction
Keras, Sequence
Xiang et al., 2020 LSTM Acquired No No Flood
TensorFlow Prediction
Matlab, Sequence
Zuo et al., 2020 LSTM Acquired Yes Yes Flood
TensorFlow Prediction
ANN,
Sequence
Ren et al., 2020 LSTM, - Acquired No No Flood
Prediction
GRU
Shuang Zhu et al., Sequence
LSTM Keras Acquired No Yes Flood
2020 Prediction
Y. Wang et al.,
CNN Keras Acquired No No Classification Flood
2020
Lasagne, Matrix
Laloy et al., 2018 GAN Existing No No Groundwater
Theano Prediction
N. Wang et al., Matrix
ANN - Collected Yes No Groundwater
2020 Prediction
 Matrix
Santos et al., 2020 CNN Keras Existing Yes Yes Groundwater
Prediction
Matrix
Mo et al., 2019a CNN PyTorch Collected Yes Yes Groundwater
Prediction
Matrix
Mo et al., 2019b CNN PyTorch Collected Yes Yes Groundwater
Prediction
A.Y. Sun et al., Keras, Sequence
CNN Acquired No No Groundwater
2019 TensorFlow Prediction
NARX,
Jeong and Park, Sequence
LSTM, TensorFlow Acquired No No Groundwater
2019 Prediction
GRU
Zhou et al., 2020 CNN PyTorch Acquired No No Regression Groundwater
Sequence
Jeong et al., 2020 LSTM TensorFlow Acquired No No Groundwater
Prediction
C. Zhang et al., Keras, Land Use and
CNN Collected No No Segmentation
2018 TensorFlow Soil
X. Zhang et al., Land Use and
LSTM TensorFlow Acquired No No Regression
2018 Soil
CNN, Land Use and
Cao et al., 2018 - Existing No No Segmentation
ELM Soil
Land Use and
Zeng et al., 2018 ANN - Acquired No No Regression
Soil
Sequence Land Use and
Reddy et al., 2018 LSTM - Acquired No Yes
Prediction Soil
Land Use and
Fu et al., 2018 CNN - Acquired No No Classification
Soil
Land Use and
Jiang, 2018 AE - Acquired No No Classification
Soil
Land Use and
Shen et al., 2019 ANN R/H2O Acquired No No Regression
Soil
Land Use and
Jin et al., 2019 CNN TensorFlow Acquired No No Segmentation
Soil
Persello et al., Land Use and
CNN - Acquired No No Segmentation
2019 Soil
Land Use and
Kroupi et al., 2019 CNN TensorFlow Existing No No Classification
Soil
Land Use and
Z. Sun et al., 2019 CNN PyTorch Acquired No No Classification
Soil
Land Use and
Meng et al., 2019 CNN - Acquired No No Classification
Soil
Kopp et al., 2019 CNN - Collected No No Segmentation Land Use and
 Soil
Matrix Land Use and
Jiang et al., 2019 CNN - Acquired No Yes
Prediction Soil
Bhosle and Land Use and
CNN TensorFlow Existing No No Classification
Musande, 2019 Soil
C. Zhang et al., ANN, Matrix Land Use and
- Existing No No
2019 CNN Prediction Soil
Matrix
J. Wang et al., Land Use and
DBN - Acquired No No Prediction,
2020 Soil
Regression
Nam and Wang, Land Use and
AE R/H2O Acquired No No Classification
2020 Soil
Land Use and
O'Neil et al., 2020 CNN TensorFlow Acquired Yes Yes Classification
Soil
Land Use and
Yang et al., 2020 CNN Keras Acquired No Yes Segmentation
Soil
Abdi et al., 2018 CNN - Existing No Yes Classification Others
Li et al., 2018 CNN, AE PyTorch Acquired No Yes Segmentation Others
Rohmat et al.,
ANN MATLAB Acquired No No Regression Others
2019
Amirkolaee and Matrix
CNN MATLAB Existing No Yes Others
Arefi, 2019 Prediction
C. Wang et al.,
CNN Keras Existing No No Classification Others
2019
Kylili et al., 2019 CNN - Collected No No Classification Others
Keras,
Kang, 2019 CNN Acquired No No Classification Others
TensorFlow
Haklidir and
ANN - Acquired No Yes Regression Others
Haklidir, 2019
Unsupervised
Kim et al., 2020 GAN, AE - Acquired No No Others
Learning
J. Zhang et al.,
LSTM Theano Acquired No No Regression Surface Water
2018
Yongqi Liu et al., Keras, Sequence
ANN Acquired No Yes Surface Water
2019 TensorFlow Prediction
C. Xiao et al., CNN, Keras, Matrix
Acquired No No Surface Water
2019 LSTM TensorFlow Prediction
Read et al., 2019 LSTM - Acquired No No Regression Surface Water
Yansong Liu et
CNN Caffe Existing No No Segmentation Surface Water
al., 2019
H. Xiao et al.,
CNN PyTorch Existing No No Classification Surface Water
2019
Mei et al., 2019 CNN PyTorch Existing No No Regression Surface Water
Ling et al., 2019 CNN MATLAB Acquired No No Segmentation Surface Water
Song et al., 2019 CNN Caffe Existing No No Classification Surface Water
Hrnjica and Sequence
LSTM - Acquired No No Surface Water
Bonacci, 2019 Prediction
Sequence
Qi et al, 2019 LSTM - Acquired No No Surface Water
Prediction
Senlin Zhu et al., ANNdotNET, Sequence
LSTM Acquired No No Surface Water
2020 CNTK Prediction
RNN,
Lee and Lee, 2018 - Acquired No No Regression Water Quality
LSTM
Hamshaw et al.,
RBM MATLAB Acquired Yes Yes Classification Water Quality
2018
Keras, Sequence
P. Liu et al., 2019 LSTM Acquired No No Water Quality
TensorFlow Prediction
Yurtsever and
CNN Caffe Collected No No Classification Water Quality
Yurtsever, 2019
LSTM,
Sequence
Li et al., 2019 GRU, - Acquired No No Water Quality
Prediction
ENN
Sequence
Shin et al., 2019 LSTM - Acquired No No Water Quality
Prediction
Banerjee et al.,
ANN R/H2O Collected No No Regression Water Quality
2019
P. Wang et al., Sequence
LSTM - Acquired No No Water Quality
2019 Prediction
Yim et al., 2020 ANN MATLAB Collected No No Regression Water Quality
Sequence
Zou et al., 2020 LSTM Keras Acquired No No Water Quality
Prediction
Sequence
Liang et al., 2020 LSTM Keras Acquired No No Water Quality
Prediction
Barzegar et al., CNN, Sequence
- Collected No No Water Quality
2020 LSTM Prediction
Sequence
Yu et al., 2020 LSTM - Acquired No No Water Quality
Prediction
Water
Duo Zhang et al., Keras, Sequence
LSTM Acquired No No Resources
2018a TensorFlow Prediction
Management
 Water
Duo Zhang et al., LSTM, Keras, Sequence
Acquired No No Resources
2018b GRU TensorFlow Prediction
Management
LSTM, Water
Duo Zhang et al., Keras,
NARX, Collected Yes Yes Regression Resources
2018c TensorFlow
ENN Management
Water
Sequence
Harrou et al., 2018 DBN - Collected No No Resources
Prediction
Management
Water
Shi and Xu, 2018 AE - Collected No No Regression Resources
Management
Water
ANN,
Zhou et al., 2019 PyTorch Existing Yes Yes Classification Resources
CNN
Management
Water
Fang et al., 2019 CNN - Acquired No No Classification Resources
Management
Water
Sun et al., 2020 ANN - Acquired No No Regression Resources
Management
Water
ANN, Sequence
Karimi et al., 2019 MATLAB Collected No No Resources
LSTM Prediction
Management
Water
Xu et al., 2020 LSTM - Acquired No No Regression Resources
Management
Water
Reinforcement
Nam et al., 2020 DQN - Acquired No No Resources
Learning
Management
Water
Mamandipoor et Keras,
LSTM Acquired No No Classification Resources
al., 2020 TensorFlow
Management
Tang et al., 2018 ANN - Acquired No No Regression Weather
Klampanos et al., Unsupervised
AE, CNN - Acquired No No Weather
2018 Learning
Scher and Keras, Matrix
CNN Acquired No No Weather
Messori, 2018 TensorFlow Prediction
Ukkonen and
ANN Keras Acquired No Yes Classification Weather
Mäkelä, 2019
B. He et al., 2019 LSTM - Acquired No No Classification Weather
Jeppesen et al., Keras,
CNN Existing Yes Yes Segmentation Weather
2019 TensorFlow
 Matrix
Chen et al., 2019 GAN PyTorch Acquired No No Weather
Prediction
Wieland et al., Keras,
CNN Existing No Yes Segmentation Weather
2019 TensorFlow
CNN, Keras, Matrix
Weyn et al., 2019 Acquired No No Weather
LSTM TensorFlow Prediction
Wei and Cheng, Sequence
ANN Weka Acquired No No Weather
2019 Prediction
Z. Zhang et al.,
CNN - Acquired No Yes Classification Weather
2019
Kim et al., 2019 ANN - Acquired No No Regression Weather
Matrix
Pan et al., 2019 CNN - Acquired No Yes Weather
Prediction
LSTM,
Tran and Song, Matrix
GRU, TensorFlow Existing No Yes Weather
2019 Prediction
CNN
Poornima and LSTM, Keras, Sequence
Acquired No Yes Weather
Pushpalatha, 2019 ELM TensorFlow Prediction
Chai et al., 2019 CNN - Acquired No Yes Segmentation Weather
LSTM, Matrix
Wu et al., 2020 - Acquired No Yes Weather
CNN Prediction
Zhang et al., 2020 LSTM - Acquired No No Regression Weather
LSTM, Sequence
Su et al., 2020 - Acquired No No Weather
CNN Prediction
CNN, Matrix
Chen et al., 2020 PyTorch Existing No Yes Weather
LSTM Prediction
Matrix
Weber et al., 2020 CNN TensorFlow Acquired Yes Yes Weather
Prediction
Sequence
Yan et al., 2020 CNN TensorFlow Acquired No Yes Weather
Prediction
Q. Wang et al., Matrix
RNN - Acquired No No Weather
2020 Prediction

Results
In this section we provide brief summaries of papers presented in the previous section (Table 1.)
Papers are grouped and interpreted by their use case.

Streamflow and Flood

Runoff prediction and flood forecasting are major tasks in rainfall-runoff modeling. Toward this
end, many researchers have applied cutting-edge deep learning architectures to the runoff
prediction and flood forecasting tasks. Since rainfall and runoff are both time series data, the
common networks for the streamflow prediction and flood forecast are RNN, LSTM, NAR,
and ENN. Kratzert et al. (2018) applied an LSTM model on daily runoff prediction for the first
time, considering the meteorological observations with results better than a well-established
physical model SAC-SMA+Snow-17. In 2019, Kratzert et al. (2019) further applied the LSTM
model to 531 watersheds in U.S. with k-fold cross validation and it shows that LSTM can be
applied on ungaged watersheds with better results than physical models such as calibrated SAC-
SMA and the National Water Model. Other researchers applied recurrent neural networks to the
runoff forecast and compared their outputs to other machine learning models. Damavandi et al.
(2019) proposed an LSTM model on a Texas watershed predicting the next day's daily
streamflow using climate data and the current day's streamflow. Their results show that LSTM
performs better than physical model CaMa-Flood. Di Zhang et al. (2018) applied an LSTM
model on monthly reservoir inflow and outflow predictions in hourly, daily, and monthly basis
with better results than SVM and BPNN. Kumar et al. (2019) applied RNN and LSTM models
for the monthly rainfall prediction in India and shows LSTM provides better results. Qin et al.
(2019) applied the LSTM on the streamflow prediction and compared it with the Autoregression
model. S. Yang et al. (2019) applied an LSTM model on the daily reservoir overflow prediction.
NAR with external input and LSTM are used for three reservoirs with geographic information,
daily precipitation, air temperature, wind speeds, relative humidity, and sunshine duration. Wan
et al. (2019) also successfully applied Elman Neural Network to a real-time 3-hour ahead flood
forecasting.

Since hyper-parameter optimization is a problem in deep learning, some studies focused on

applying additional optimization algorithms on deep learning models. Yuan et al. (2018)
proposed two models that use the ant lion optimizer (ALO) and particle swarm optimization
(PSO) to optimize the parameters and hidden layers of an LSTM model, which are named
LSTM-ALO and LSTM-PSO. Their results show that the LSTM-PSO outperformed the LSTM
and LSTM-ALO. S. Yang et al. (2019) proposed a Genetic Algorithm based NAXR (GA-
NAXR), which outperforms the NAXR and LSTM. Ni et al. (2019) proposed two LSTM based
models, which are wavelet-LSTM (WLSTM) and CNN+LSTM (CLSTM) for the rainfall and
streamflow forecasting, and both models have better results than LSTM. Kabir et al. (2020)
proposed a wavelet-ANN to make the hourly streamflow predictions. Results show that wavelet-
ANN can make acceptable predictions for at most 6 hours ahead, which outperforms ANN,
DBN, and SVR.

Some studies focused on the data pretreatment such as the decomposition of rainfall and
runoff prior to deep learning models. He et al. (2019) proposed a DNN model for daily runoff
prediction where the inputs are the runoff series that were decomposed into multiple intrinsic
mode functions (IMFs) with variational mode decomposition (VMD). Hu et al. (2019) proposed
an LSTM model for flood forecast with the preprocessing of proper orthogonal decomposition
(POD) and singular value decomposition (SVD) prior to LSTM. Zuo et al. (2020) proposed three
LSTM models with different pretreatments, which are variational mode decomposition (VMD),
ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for
daily streamflow up to 7 days ahead. Zhu et al. (2020) proposed a probabilistic LSTM model
coupled with the Gaussian process (GP) to deal with the probabilistic daily streamflow
forecasting. These studies show that the pretreatment of input may help to improve the deep
learning model accuracy.
Other studies focused on constructing more complex deep learning architectures such as
autoencoder, encoder-decoder, and customized layer based on the LSTM. Bai et al. (2019)
proposed an LSTM model with stack autoencoder (SAE) to predict daily discharge values based
on one-week discharge values, and the results of SAE-LSTM outperform LSTM alone. For
multiple time-step flood forecast tasks, an encoder-decoder LSTM is proposed for the runoff
prediction by Kao et al. (2020) and Xiang et al. (2020). Kao et al. (2020) proposed an encoder-
decoder LSTM model that can be used on multi-timestep output predictions for up to 6 hours.
Xiang et al. (2020) proposed an encoder-decoder LSTM model that can be used to predict for up
to 24 hours ahead. Both studies showed the encoder-decoder LSTM is better than LSTM. In
particular, Kratzert et al. (2019) proposed the Entity-Aware-LSTM network, which designed a
specific layer for the rainfall-runoff modeling based on LSTM. This network allows for learning
catchment similarities as a feature layer, and data from multiple watersheds can be used to
provide runoff for a watershed. These studies applied some high-level designs to the LSTM
network and can perform much better than normal LSTM on the long-term or multiple
watersheds.

Several studies coupled physical models with deep learning networks. T. Yang et al. (2019)
proposed a model using LSTM to improve the performance of flood simulations of a physical
model. The watershed-averaged daily precipitation, wind, temperature and model-simulated
discharge from GHMs+CaMa Flood model in 1971-2020 were used to model the discharge. This
indicates the deep learning models can be used to improve the streamflow forecast
accuracy of physical models. Nguyen and Bae (2020) proposed an LSTM network using the
quantitative precipitation forecasts (QPFs) of the McGill Algorithm for Precipitation nowcasting
by Lagrangian Extrapolation (MAPLE) system to reproduce three-hour mean areal precipitation
(MAP) forecasts. Corrected MAPs are used as input to a coupled 1D/2D urban inundation model
to predict water levels and relevant inundation areas (1D conduit network model and 2D
overland flow model). In this model, LSTM takes a forecast from MAPLE and then reproduced
MAPs are used by coupled 1D/2D urban inundation model. Worland et al. (2019) proposed a
DNN model to predict the flow‐duration curves using USGS streamflow data by constructing 15
output values representing 15 quantiles of the curve. These indicate the deep learning models
can be used as surrogate models of physical models or curves.

Some studies focused on flood susceptibility and flood prediction capabilities. Bui et al.
(2020) applied a DNN network with 11 variables such as DEM, aspect, slope, etc. to predict the
flood susceptibility, a value between 0 to 1, for an area. Wang et al. (2020) proposed a CNN
network with 13 flood triggering factors in the study area to map the flood susceptibility for the
study area. In this project, each pixel may have different flood susceptibility values.
Sankaranarayanan et al. (2019) applied a DNN network to classify if flooding is possible in an
area for the month given total precipitation and temperature. This study simplified the project
into a binary prediction task of if there will be a flood event or not. The same simplification is
done by Tien et al. (2020), who applied a DNN network to classify if a region is flash flood
prone or not using the elevation, slope, aspect, curvature, stream density, NDVI, soil type,
lithology and rainfall data as input.

With CNNs, some innovative flood monitor and forecast projects are now possible. Wang et
al. (2019) applied a CNN model that predicted the real-time hourly water levels for warning
systems during typhoons using satellite images. Bhola et al. (2019) proposed a model that
estimates the water level from CCTV camera images using a CNN model. The model performed
the edge detection to find the water body in the photo, and the water level is then calculated from
some physical measurements. Moy et al. (2019) proposed a model that calculated the flooded-
area and the surface observed flooding index (SOFI) with CCTV cameras using CNN. U-net
CNN is used to segment the stream shape from a CCTV camera and another CNN model is used
to calculate the flooded areas in pixels from the segmented photo.

Subsurface and Groundwater

There are several different types of studies in subsurface and groundwater. Different deep
learning models can be used in each of different types of studies. One type of groundwater
study is the estimation of water table level or flow rate. With the groundwater monitoring
wells data, this is a 1-D regression task similar to the surface water predictions using recurrent
models. Jeong and Park (2019) applied the NARX, LSTM and GRU on the water table level
estimations with observed data from monitoring wells. It is found that the estimations from the
NARX and LSTM models are superior to those of the other models in terms of prediction
accuracy. Jeong et al. (2020) further applied LSTM with multiple loss functions, which shows
that the proposed LSTM model with cost function of MSE with Whittaker smoother, least
trimmed squares, and asymmetric weighting has the best performance on groundwater level
prediction with data corrupted by outliers and noise. For groundwater flow prediction, Wang et
al. (2020) proposed a theory-guided deep neural network which not only makes the predictions
of groundwater flow, but also estimates the parameters of the partial differential equation (PDE)
as well as the initial condition and boundary condition of the PDE. By constructing the loss
function, the theory-guided neural network can provide the prediction results with reasonable
parameters of the physical model PDE.

More groundwater studies take a cross section in time-series and focus on a 2-D map.
Examples include the groundwater water balance map (Sun et al., 2019), hydraulic conductivity
field map (Zhou et al., 2020), pressure and CO2 saturation field map (Mo et al., 2019a). CNN
models can be used in these studies. Sun et al. (2019) proposed a CNN model using the physical
model NOAH simulation results as input to predict the groundwater water balance. Thus, the
CNN model is used to correct the physical model results by learning the spatial and temporal
patterns of residuals between GRACE observations and NOAH simulations. Results show that
the CNN can significantly improve the physical model simulation accuracy. Zhou et al. (2020)
proposed a CNN of eight layers to learn a map between stochastic conductivity field and
longitudinal macro-dispersivity based on synthetic 2-D conductivity fields. The estimations are
in acceptable accuracy with moderate heterogeneity. Mo et al. (2019a) proposed an Encoder-
Decoder CNN to approximate the pressure and CO2 saturation field map in different time steps
as a surrogate model. Furthermore, some studies in groundwater concern 3D mapping. An
example is the flow rate estimation in a 3D rock. Santos et al. (2020) proposed a 3D CNN to
predict the estimated state solution of Navier-Stokes equation for laminar flow, which is the flow
rate, with 3D rock images. This 3D CNN is a surrogate model of the Navier-Stokes equation, and
takes less than a second.

In groundwater studies, one of the other deep learning applications is inversion, such as to
identify the contaminate source in groundwater. Some complex traditional algorithms can be
used to solve this problem. However, it will be not efficient when the data is in high dimensions.
Mo et al. (2019b) developed a deep autoregressive neural network which was used as the
surrogate model of this high dimensional inverse problem and provides more accurate inversion
results and predictive uncertainty estimations than physical models. Laloy et al. (2018) proposed
another approach for the inversion by using GAN. With the GAN models, the inversion rapidly
explores the posterior model distribution of the 2-D steady state flow and recovers model
realizations that fit the data close to the true model results.

Finally, Sun et al. (2020) investigate three learning-based models, namely DNN, Multiple Linear
Regression (MLR), and SARIMAX, to find missing monthly data in total water from GRACE
(Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) Data (Tapley et al. 2004). Based on the results, the
performance of DNN is slightly better than SARIMAX, significantly better than MLP in most of
the basins. However, three learning‐based models are reliable for the reconstruction of GRACE
data in areas with humid and no/low human interventions. Dynamic multiphase flow in
heterogeneous media is a hard problem in groundwater studies. These studies show the deep
learning models can work as surrogate models by improving computational efficiency in
groundwater dynamic predictions and inversions.

Land and Soil

The segmentation and classification of land use and land cover are important for water and soil
resources management. Many studies have applied the deep learning networks to create a
more accurate land cover map from satellite or radar imagery. Abdi et al., 2018 applied
SAE and CNN on land cover classification of urban remote sensing data. Tests on 9 datasets
show that SAE and CNN are better than machine learning models like logistic regression, Naive
Bayes, KNN and SVM. Cao et al. (2018) applied ELM and CNNs to classify land cover
categories on satellite imagery and the results show the combined CNN–ELM method has the
highest accuracy. Shen et al. (2019) applied a DNN network to predict the land drought index
using the precipitation data, meteorological drought index data and soil relative moisture data.
Bhosle et al. (2019) applied a CNN model on the land cover land use classification on Indian
Pines dataset. Some studies applied more complex coupled models including encoder-decoder,
autoencoder, 3D networks, and coupled machine learning models to achieve a higher model
accuracy. Zhang et al. (2019) applied 3D-CNN and 3D-DenseNet models on the land cover land
use classification on Indian Pines and Pavia University dataset. All these studies showed a high
accuracy of the land cover identification task. Kounghoon et al. (2020) applied the autoencoders
prior to the random forest, SVM and other machine learning models to the landslide
susceptibility prediction. Results show that random forest with an autoencoder gives more
accurate results than other machine learning methods. In the study of wetland type identification
by Meng et al. (2019), results show that the ensemble model SVM-CNN performs better than
CNN and SVM. O'Neil et al. (2020) applied an Encoder-Decoder CNN model to classify the
wetland types using LiDAR radar dataset and NDVI index data. This study used the LiDAR
DEM and remote sensing images to generate physically informed input including Slope, NDVI,
DTW, and TWI. In particular, Kroupi et al. (2019) applied a CNN based model to land cover
classification that trained on the European satellite dataset - EuroSAT and tested in a region
outside Europe, and still provides promising results despite differences in tested and trained
regions. These results indicate the CNN models have a high model accuracy as well as high
robustness in the land use land type classification task.
In addition to applying some known networks, some researchers developed objective-based
CNN rather than traditional pixel-based CNN to better identify the land use and land
types. Zhang et al. (2018) proposed an object-based CNN to label very fine spatial resolution
(VFSR) remotely sensed images to do object-wise segmentation rather than pixel-wise
segmentation in urban areas. Fu et al. (2018) proposed a blocks-based object-based CNN for
classification of land use and land cover types and achieved end-to-end classification. This
model works well on irregular segmentation objects which is a common in land use
classification. Jiang (2018) proposed an object-based CNN with an autoencoder for extracting
high level features automatically. Results show the AE-object-CNN is better than three manual
design feature systems. Jin et al. (2019) proposed an object-oriented CNN which used a typical
rule set of feature objects to construct the object-oriented segmentation results before using a
CNN to make the classification. These studies show object-based studies have better
performance than simple CNN.

Some studies focus on more specific tasks based on different study purposes such as the
identification of agricultural fields, impervious surfaces, wetland types, water body types,
and crop types. Persello et al. (2019) applied two CNN models, SegNet (Badrinarayanan et al.,
2017) and VGG16 (Simonyan and Zisserman 2014), for the segmentation and classification of
agricultural fields. Sun et al. (2019) applied a CNN model to classify if the land is impervious
surfaces, vegetation or bare soil from satellite imagery or both the satellite and LIDAR data.
Results show that the model with LIDAR data provides better results than the model with
satellite imagery only. Meng et al. (2019) applied to identify the wetland types in one lake using
the Chinese remote sensing imagery GF-2. Bhosle et al. (2019) applied a CNN model to identify
crop types on EO-1 Hyperion sensor hyperspectral imagery. Yang et al. (2020) applied CNNs to
identify the water body types from remote sensing images. Mask R-CNN is used to segment the
water body, and the ResNets (He et al., 2015) including ResNet-50 and ResNet-101 are used to
identify the water body types. Results show a high accuracy on regular-shaped water bodies.

Similar networks can be used to generate DEMs, which is another type of land use study.
Jiang et al. (2019) applied a CNN model to predict the paleo-valley DEM using the original
DEM data and electrical conductivity. The electrical conductivity data are collected from the
field study, and the CNN models used in this study distinguish the valley and non-valley pixels,
which can find the spatial connectivity of the paleo-valley. The CNN can efficiently constrain
three-dimensional paleo-valley geometry DEM.

Snow cover, a special study in land cover studies, can be measured by deep learning models
in different approaches. Kopp et al. (2019) proposed a model to predict the snow depth using
OpenCV and Mask R-CNN on the surveillance camera photos. The Mask R-CNN is used to
segment the detectable measuring rod, and then the OpenCV library can be used to identify the
snow depth by measuring how much of the measuring rod gets covered by snow. Wang et al.
(2020) applied a DBN and CNN to estimate snow depth from the geographical data. DBN takes
multiple inputs including latitude, longitude, elevation, forest cover fraction, time, passive
microwave horizontal and vertical polarization brightness temperatures of 19 and 37 GHz.
Results show that the DBN outperforms CNN in this study.
Additional land and soil related studies include the land surface temperature, soil salinity,
vegetation dynamics over time, and these can be done with time-series related models such
as LSTM. Zhang et al. (2018) applied the ensemble composition-based LSTM models on the
daily land surface temperature simulation. The original daily land surface temperature data series
were decomposed into many Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) and a single residue item. And the
Partial Autocorrelation Function (PACF) is used to obtain the number of input data sample
points for LSTM models. Zeng et al. (2018) applied Partial Least Square Regression (PLSR),
SVM and DNN for predicting soil salinity from images. Surprisingly, DNN performs worse than
PLSR for this task. Reddy et al. (2018) applied a LSTM model to predict the vegetation
dynamics using NDVI images from 2000 to 2016 in a 7-day gap. This study shows that the
single feature NDVI can be used to provide accurate vegetation prediction over time.

Surface Water
The prediction of water level is crucial for water resources management and protecting the
natural environment. Many studies have applied deep learning methods, such as LSTM
and ANN, to forecast the water level from one day to one year. Hrnjica and Bonacci (2019)
investigate two different ANNs, namely LSTM and Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN), to
forecast the lake water level. Monthly measurements for the last 38 years of Vrana Lake, Croatia
is utilized for training the models in order to predict 6 or 12 months ahead of the lake water level.
The set of sequences with different lengths created from the obtained data is used in the
networks, instead of using classical lagged data. The results of LSTM and FFNN are compared
with classical time forecasting methods and ANN. According to the results, the performance of
LSTM is the best among the models in all scenarios, while FFNN provides better accuracy than
the compared methods in both 6 and 12 months prediction. Senlin Zhu et al. (2020) also
investigate LSTM and FFNN in their work with data from a different region. However, the
models in this paper are designed to predict one month ahead of the lake water level for 69
temperate lakes in Poland. Their results indicate that LSTM and FFNN perform similarly most of
the time, unlike in the previous paper. The reasons for this situation can be the differences
between the datasets, prediction intervals, or model designs.

In addition to lake water level prediction, Yongqi Liu et al. (2019) developed a Bayesian Neural
Network, which is based on ANN with posterior inference, to forecast the water level in a
reservoir to derive operation rules. According to the paper, the current reservoir status and future
inflows are the primary factors that affect operational decisions. Also, the influence of inflow
uncertainties on reservoir operations is more than model parameter uncertainty. Their findings
show the impact of the input data alongside the promising results of Bayesian NN. Qi et al.
(2019) forecast daily reservoir inflow by ensembling the different results from the LSTM models
with different decomposed inflow data as inputs for more accurate assumptions. Zhang et al.
(2018) propose an LSTM model to predict water table depth in agricultural areas. The LSTM
model takes monthly water diversion, evaporation, precipitation, temperature, and time as inputs
for prediction of the water table depth. The results of the LSTM model are compared with the
FFNN model, and the LSTM model performs better than the FFNN model. Also, it is highlighted
that the dropout method increases the LSTM model's accuracy in this task.

Alongside the water level or flow, the prediction of water temperature has received much
attention in the scholarship. C. Xiao et al. (2019) propose a convolutional long short-term
memory (ConvLSTM) model to predict the sea surface temperature (SST). In the paper, 36 years
of satellite-derived SST data are used. Based on the results, the ConvLSTM model produces
more accurate results than the linear support vector regression model and two different LSTM
models for short and mid-term temperature prediction. Read et al. (2019) aim to predict lake
water temperatures based on depth. A hybrid LSTM and theory-based feedbacks (model
penalties) model was developed. According to the results, the hybrid model produces the best
results among the tested methods in the paper. The results from the paper can be seen as an
example of improving predictions by integrating scientific rules with DL methods.

In addition to the aforementioned subtopics in surface water, various tasks are also
investigated by scholars such as segmentation, change detection, or super-resolution.
Despite extensive usage of LSTM or ANN in previously aforementioned papers, CNN models
are generally used in these tasks. Yansong Liu et al. (2019) label objects in aerial images as
water, tree, etc. with the help of a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) model and
multinomial logistic regression. FCN takes the aerial image and returns a probability. At the
same time, LiDAR data passes into multinomial logistic regression and returns another
probability. These two probabilities are combined with higher-order conditional random field
formulation to produce a final probability. Based on the final probability, objects are labeled with
the corresponding group. Mei et al. (2019) develop a CNN based model to measure the sea ice
thickness in Antarctica from LiDAR data. The input is a windowed LiDAR scan (snow
freeboard), and the mean ice thickness is the output of the model. In addition to the LiDAR scan,
the paper investigates the effects of different inputs such as surface roughness and snow depth on
the task. Ling et al. (2019) use the CNN model in order to generate a finer resolution of the
image to measure the wetted river width. Then, the output of CNN is used to measure the width
of the river. Song et al. (2019) aim to detect the change in surface water in remote sensing
images. An FCN model is proposed and used for the same regions at different times. The FCN
model returns the surface water regions for each time. The outputs for the same regions are
compared, and a change map is created to show the difference. Beyond these publications, H.
Xiao et al. (2019) introduce a dataset for the classification of ice crystals. The dataset contains
7282 images in 10 different categories. The performance of numerous pre-trained models, such
as AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2012) and VGGNet(s) (Simonyan and Zisserman 2014), are also
provided in the paper.

Water Quality
Water quality monitoring and prediction are vital operations for many fields, such as water
resources management and water treatment. Water quality and safety depend on numerous
parameters with complex biological, chemical, and physical interactions. As such, deterministic
water quality models are a realistic option in only the simplest and idealized scenarios. However,
data-driven models are increasingly being used in a variety of water quality applications. One
such application area is predicting surface water quality. Li et al. (2019) propose an ensemble
approach that combines three RNN models with Dempster/Shafer (D-S) evidence theory (Shafer
1976) to predict the quality of water. The results of three RNN models, namely LSTM, GRU,
and Elman Neural Network, are combined by D-S evidence theory for the final output. The
combined model predicts at most 50 hours in advance, and the results show that the model
accuracy reduces significantly over 25 hours. Liu et al. (2019) use an LSTM model to forecast
drinking water quality for up to 6 months. Zou et al. (2020) develop an ensemble approach to
predict water quality data, such as pH, DO, CODMn, and NH3-N. The approach based on using
three LSTM models that different size interval data feed each of them and the final prediction is
a combination of the results of three LSTM models. Banerjee et al. (2019) choose the indicators,
namely dissolved oxygen and zooplankton abundance, to reflect the water quality level of a
reservoir.

An ANN model is proposed to model the selected indicators in order to represent the water
quality level. Yu et al. (2020) combine the LSTM model with Wavelet Mean Fusion and
Wavelet Domain Threshold Denoising to simulate the change of chlorophyll-a concentration in
Dianchi Lake, China and use 15 water quality parameters as inputs, such as pH and DO. Liang et
al. (2020) also work with the prediction of the chlorophyll-a concentration level. Fabricated data
are created by the environmental fluid dynamics code (EFDC) to train an LSTM model. The
LSTM model can forecast the chlorophyll-a concentration level for up to one month.
Chlorophyll-a, water temperature, and total phosphorus are identified as critical inputs that affect
the performance of the LSTM model. Barzegar et al. (2020) investigate multiple models to
predict the level of DO and chlorophyll-a in Small Prespa Lake, Greece. Three different NN
models, namely CNN, LSTM, and CNN-LSTM, were developed to forecast the DO and
chlorophyll-a concentrations and use pH, oxidation-reduction potential (ORP), water
temperature, and electrical conductivity (EC) as inputs for the models. In addition to ANN
models, SVM and decision tree models are used for the performance comparison. According to
results, the hybrid CNN-LSTM model provides the best accuracy to predict both DO and
chlorophyll-a.

Yim et al. (2020) develop a stacked autoencoder-deep neural network (SAE-DNN) to predict
phycocyanin (PC) concentrations in inland waters from in-situ hyperspectral data. The proposed
architecture’s ability for the prediction from airborne hyperspectral imagery is examined. Shin et
al. (2019) introduce an LSTM model to forecast the occurrence of harmful algal blooms in the
South Sea of Korea. Sea surface temperature and photosynthetically available radiation are
extracted from satellite data to be used as inputs for the LSTM model in order to minimize the
damage. Lee and Lee (2018) aim to predict the occurrence and number of harmful algal blooms
with an LSTM model by providing weekly water quality and quantity data. The LSTM model's
performance is compared with RNN and MLP models, and the LSTM provides better results
among all the investigated methods based on the results. Hamshaw et al. (2018) use the
Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) to classify the sediment-discharge curve in 14 categories
from the 2D image of the suspended-sediment discharge plots from 600+ storm events. Finally,
an LSTM based system is proposed to identify the characteristics of the water pollutants and
trace its sources in the work of Wang et al. (2019). In the system, a water quality cross-validation
map is generated to identify pollutants and, based on defined rules, track the pollutants to
common industries.

Water Resources Management

Urban water systems are essential to modern cities. Efficient operation of water treatment
plants, wastewater treatment plants, and conveyance networks require accurate modelling
of these interconnected systems. Duo Zhang et al. (2018b) investigate the multiple models to
simulate and predict the water level of Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) structure. In the study,
the collected data from IoT is used separately with four different neural networks, namely MLP,
ANN with Wavelet, LSTM, and GRU, to compare the networks with each other. According to
the results, LSTM and GRU have good performances with respect to others, but GRU has a
quicker learning curve, fewer parameters, and simpler architecture. Despite these advantages, the
accuracy of GRU is slightly lower than the LSTM. Duo Zhang et al. (2018a) predict the next
hour's wastewater flow to avoid sewer overflow using LSTM with the traditional hydraulic
model on the sewer system. This one-hour prediction is tested in several scenarios, which are: 1-
time step prediction at the 1-hr sampling frequency, 2-time steps prediction at the 30-min
sampling frequency, 4-time steps prediction at 15-min sampling frequency, and 6-time steps
prediction at 10-min sampling frequency. The performance of the LSTM based model is
compared with Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN),
and the LSTM based model has the best accuracy in all scenarios. Duo Zhang et al. (2018c) also
predict the next hour's wastewater inflow for the wastewater treatment plant. The paper aims to
identify which parts of the sewer system have more free space and take action based on the
outcome. LSTM, NARX, Elman Neural Network are compared, and the LSTM model provides
better results than other methods based on the results. Karimi et al. (2019) propose an LSTM
model to forecast flow in sanitary sewer systems. It is claimed that accepting the groundwater as
an additional input for the LSTM model increases the overall accuracy of the task.

In addition to the prediction of the wastewater level or flow, some studies aim to detect
conveyance network conditions. Xu et al. (2020) aim to detect abnormal working conditions in
the water supply network. Besides the detection of abnormal conditions, pressure in the water
supply network is predicted. An LSTM model is developed to achieve these goals. The
performance of the LSTM model outperforms the traditional prediction models, such as SVM.
Zhou et al. (2019) use an ANN model to identify burst locations in a water distribution network.
The model takes the pressure data as input and returns one or several possible pipes, which can
be the location of the burst. Fang et al. (2019) focus on detecting multiple leakage points in a
water distribution network with a CNN based model. The model accepts the pressure
measurements of the distributed water system as input and returns the possible locations of
leakage points.

Various studies explore the strength of deep learning powered modeling in water and
wastewater treatment procedures. Shi and Xu (2018) develop a Stacked Denoising
AutoEncoders (SDAE) to predict a two-stage biofilm system's performance. Nam et al. (2020)
propose a DQN-based system to operate membrane bioreactor (MBR) more efficiently. It aims to
maximize the system's energy efficiency while meeting stringent discharge qualities. GoogLeNet
(Szegedy et al. 2015) architecture is used to identify and classify microbeads in urban
wastewater into five categories based on microscopic images in the work of Yurtsever and
Yurtsever (2019). Harrou et al. (2018) provide a case study using a DBM-SVM model to identify
abnormal signals from the water features such as pH, conductivity, etc. in wastewater treatment
plants. The results show that it is possible to detect the abnormal conditions in order to alert the
system early based on the outcome of the DBM-SVM model. Mamandipoor et al. (2020) develop
an LSTM model to monitor a wastewater treatment plant for detecting faults during the oxidation
and nitrification processes.
Weather
Rainfall forecasting is one of the significant tasks in the domain of meteorology. Several
techniques have been proposed to forecast rainfall with the help of statistics, machine
learning, and deep learning. Zhang et al. (2020) introduce an ensemble approach to forecast
rainfall. In the first step, eight major meteorological factors are selected via correlation analysis
between control forecast meteorological factors and real-time rainfall. Then, samples are divided
into four categories by K-means clustering. The LSTM based model is fed by each cluster, and
outputs are combined to reach the final prediction. Weber et al. (2020) develop a CNN-based
surrogate model for one of the global climate model CanESM2 (Arora et al. 2011). The CNN
model is fed by 97 years of monthly precipitation output from CanESM2, and the model
preserves its performance even when the forecast length is expanded to 120 months. According
to the paper, the accuracy of the model can be increased by deeper networks. Poornima and
Pushpalatha (2019) investigate an LSTM model to forecast the rainfall with the help of 34 years
of rainfall data. In the paper, the LSTM model results are compared with multiple methods, such
as Holt-Winters and ARIMA. Tang et al. (2018) introduce a DNN model to predict rain and
snow rates at high altitudes. In the paper, passive microwave, infrared and environmental data
are trained to the reference precipitation data sets, which are obtained by two space-borne radars
for the estimations. The results of the DNN model are compared with many methods, such as the
Goddard Profiling Algorithm (GPROF). The experiment results show that the DNN model is
capable of predicting snow and rain rate more accurately than other tested methods at high
altitudes.

Some studies specifically focus on the improvement of quantitive precipitation estimation

accuracy, alongside precipitation nowcasting. Since the prediction of precipitation generally is
a time series problem, the usage of LSTM architecture is common on this task. Wu et al. (2020)
design a fusion model, which is a combination of CNN and LSTM, to improve quantitative
precipitation estimation accuracy. The proposed model uses satellite data, rain gauge data, and
thermal infrared images. The CNN part of the model extracts the spatial characteristics of the
satellite, rain gauge, and thermal infrared data, where The LSTM part of the model handles the
time dependencies of the provided data. The performance of the CNN-LSTM model is better
than the comparative models, such as CNN, LSTM, and MLP. Yan et al. (2020) use a CNN
model to forecast short-term precipitation with the help of radar reflectance images for a local
area in China. As a dataset, the radar reflection images and the corresponding precipitation
values for one hour are collected. The model takes the images as inputs and returns the forecast
value for one-hour precipitation. The CNN model contains residual links between the layers,
which increase the efficiency of the model. Chen et al. (2020) focus on precipitation nowcasting
using a ConvLSTM model. The model accepts the radar echo data in order to forecast 30 or 60
minutes of precipitation value. According to results, using the customized multisigmoid loss
function and group normalization provides better performance than ConvLSTM with classical
loss functions, such as cross-entropy loss function, and conventional extrapolation methods.
Statistical downscaling methods often provide more accurate precipitation estimation than using
raw precipitation values in the models.

Deep learning methods can be used as statistical downscaling methods to improve the
accuracy of the tasks. Pan et al. (2019) propose a CNN model as a statistical downscaling
method (SD) for daily precipitation prediction. The method is tested with 14 geogrid points in
the U.S., and SD results from the CNN model outperform other tested methods, including linear
regression, nearest neighbor, random forest, and DNN. Wang, Q. et al. (2020) develop an RNN
model to perform statistical downscaling on temperature and precipitation in order to improve
the accuracy of hydrological models. The RNN model provides better accuracy than the
compared methods, such as ANN, for the extreme temperature and precipitation downscaling
based on the evaluation of downscaled data on the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)
model.

In meteorology and remote sensing, cloud or cloud shadow detection has received attention
in the recent literature. Because U-net (Ronneberger 2015), a CNN model for biomedical
image segmentation, and Segnet (Badrinarayanan 2017), a convolutional encoder-decoder
architecture for image segmentation, provide successful results in their domain, many
researchers use those models as a base model for their works. Jeppesen et al. (2019) use the U-
net to detect clouds in satellite imagery. The model is trained and tested with Landsat 8 Biome
and SPARCS datasets. Wieland et al. (2019) aim to segment cloud, shadow, snow/ice, water, and
land in multi-spectral satellite images. The U-net based model is proposed and trained with
Landsat datasets to segment images into five categories. According to results, contrast and
brightness augmentations of the training data improve the segmentation accuracy, alongside
adding shortwave-infrared bands. Z. Zhang et al. (2019) applied the U-net based model on the
red, green, blue, and infrared waveband images from the Landsat-8 dataset for cloud detection.
LeGall-5/3 wavelet transform is used on the dataset to accelerate the model and make it feasible
to implement on-board on satellite. Chai et al. (2019) propose a CNN model based on Segnet to
detect clouds and cloud shadow in Landsat imagery.

Thunderstorms and typhoons are one of the extreme natural disasters that can cause
massive damages. Some studies focus on the prediction of those hazardous natural events to
take early actions to minimize the damage. Ukkonen and Mäkelä (2019) aim to predict the
occurrence of thunderstorms from parameters related to instability, inhibition, and moisture
mainly. A DNN model is trained with lightning data and a high-resolution global reanalysis.
Various regions, such as Sri Lanka and Europe, are used as test areas for the model. Many
valuable findings are provided related to the correlation between thunderstorm occurrence and
parameters specific to regions. Kim et al. (2019) aim to find similarities between the typhoon and
a typhoon from the past for helping to mitigate the effect of the typhoon. In the study, a DNN
model is used to encode the typhoon event by typhoon parameters, such as route, pressure, and
moving speed. The model returns the typhoon events' similarity to the historical ones, which
provide insights for officials to take early action. During the work, a database is created for 189
typhoons that occurred between 1950 and 2017. Wei and Cheng (2020) aim to predict wind
speed and wave height of a typhoon with the help of an RNN model, namely TSWP. The TSWP
model predicts wind speed first, followed by wind height for 1-6 hours in the future. The results
of the TSWP model outperform the comparative methods, such as MLP, DNN, and Logistic
Regression.

In addition to the aforementioned studies, various works have been published for different
meteorological tasks. Su et al. (2020) use the pyramid delaminating technique to generate the
global optical flow field. A ConvLSTM model takes the RGB image and generated flow field in
order to improve the forecast accuracy of echo position and intensity. The generation,
dissipation, and merging of convective cells were also better identified in comparison to other
classical methods. Weyn et al. (2019) investigate to forecast weather at 500-hPa geopotential
height by a CNN model. The paper aims to use historical gridded reanalysis data in the model
without explicit knowledge about the physical process. The CNN model produces promising
results for capturing the climatology and annual variability of 500 - hPa heights and predicts
realistic atmospheric states for 14 days. However, the CNN model still could not perform as
good as an operational weather model. B. He et al. (2019) propose an LSTM model to classify
periods as rainy or dry by microwave links. Scher and Messori (2018) aim to predict the
uncertainty of a forecast based on past forecasts and their occurrence rate with a CNN model.
The CNN model takes the atmospheric fields at three different heights as inputs and returns the
scalar value representing the predictability (or the uncertainty) of precipitation forecast.
Klampanos et al. (2018) study the relationship between nuclear events and weather. A model
with Autoencoder and CNN is used for rapid source estimation during radiological releases. The
model clusters weather events first and looks over their correlations with nuclear events. Chen et
al. (2019) design a GAN model based on SRGAN (Ledig 2017), which is a GAN architecture for
single image super-resolution, to improve the resolution of radar echo images of weather radar
systems in order to increase the accuracy of the tasks that accepts echo images as inputs. Tran
and Song (2019) design a ConvRNN model for the radar echo extrapolation task. The model uses
multiple (five) satellite images and predicts 10 steps ahead at the pixel level. During the training
process, Structural Similarity (SSIM) and multi-scale SSIM are used to obtain better results.

Unclassified Studies
Some literature included in this review did not fit within any of the defined categories in this
review. Summaries of these papers are provided in this section. Many of the papers in this
section apply deep learning methods to ocean processes. In coastal hydraulics Kang (2019) used
an improved CNN on images to classify and monitor waves. Also in coastal hydraulics, Kim et
al. (2020) used a number of deep neural networks with coastal video imagery to develop a
framework to track nearshore waves. Kylili et al (2019) use a CNN to identify floating plastic
debris in ocean images. Further, Wang et al. (2019) used a CNN architecture with a satellite
radar product to classify ocean surface roughness into ten geophysical phenomena. Li et al.
(2018) also used a CNN to classify hurricane damage from post-event aerial imagery.

The remaining three papers in this section apply deep learning in a variety of disciplines.
Haklidir and Haklidir (2019) use a DNN to predict the temperature of geothermal springs and
wells given hydrogeochemical data, including chemical concentrations. Amirkolaee and Arefi
(2109) implemented a very deep CNN structure to estimate a digital elevation model from single
airborne or spaceborne images. Finally, Rohmat et al. (2019) developed and embedded a DNN
into a GIS-based basin-scale decision support system to assess the impacts of best management
practices (BMP.) Based on geographic information and potential BMP, the DNN returns multiple
outputs which describe net flow separation between groundwater recharge, groundwater return
flow, and overland flow. This project demonstrates the potential of deep learning to integrate into
decision making on large-scale water resources projects.

Key Issues and Challenges

Deep learning captures the non-linear complex representations with datasets, making it a viable
and efficient option in predictive model creation. In machine learning literature capturing the
representation is known as representation learning (Goodfellow et al., 2016). Representation
learning relies on artificial neural networks’ ability in acting as a universal approximator (Hornik
et al., 1989; Cybenko, 1989; Leshno et al., 1993) meaning ANNs with only one hidden layer,
theoretically, could represent any function. The drawback regarding this ability is that the task in
hand might need a hidden layer that is too large to still be feasible to be trained and executed.
Adding new hidden layers to neural networks comes into play in order to cover this negation.
Consequently, one important principle of representation learning is that, with minimal data
engineering, the datasets should be fed to the neural network and let the neural network decide
which features within the dataset are important towards the goal of representing that dataset.
Even though this should be the case, the literature in the water domain does not widely apply this
principle. We attribute this to the fact that datasets are neither extensive enough in terms of the
number of given data, nor have vast spatial and/or temporal coverage.

As opposed to fields like computer vision and natural language processing, the water field lacks
high quality, collected, curated, labeled, and published datasets that are used for benchmarking
and method development. We identify this lack of benchmarking datasets as a key challenge
(Ebert-Uphoff et al., 2017) which slows the state-of-the-science deep learning applications in
water domain. Most studies reviewed herein acquire datasets from governmental agencies
depending on their needs. Though potentially convenient for a contained effort of a single work,
each one-off dataset dampens the speed of improvement of the state of the science in this field. If
researchers had the opportunity to build on a widely-accepted dataset in their fields, they would
be able to improve the accuracy of their models by taking advantage of previous models created
using the same dataset. This collaboration around common datasets and models would open
opportunities in the field, such as paving the way for their real-time usage. However, as we don’t
have many benchmarking datasets, many research groups all around the globe run similar
networks on custom datasets they acquired with limited scientific interaction.

One other problem with the data provided by authorities is that they are dispersed among
different agencies and they occasionally have mismatches in temporal and/or spatial coverage.
Even though the data provided extends to many years before covering decades, one might need
to access various databases created by several different government agencies in order to build a
dataset. Further, the period of record commonly differs across agencies and areas which causes
the data acquisition process time-consuming and sometimes inconclusive. Further complicating
data acquisition, water data are suppressed due to their military significance in some strategic
instances and contributes to limit progress in the field. We support growing access to
governmental and agency-collected water data and its use in deep learning.

We consider the fundamental understanding of deep learning within the literature as another
problematic issue emerging from the reviews made in this study. A common mistake regards
what deep learning is and what deep learning is not. Most papers seem to interpret deep learning
as a specific technique. However, deep learning is simply a broad term for various machine
learning algorithms centered upon ANNs. Various studies reviewed here claim that they employ
deep learning, yet they only take advantage of traditional ANN approaches. Most of the time this
utilization doesn’t surpass the extent of a study that employs conventional statistical modelling.
This phenomenon raises questions whether these studies attempt to exploit the keywords, using
the term “deep learning” to take advantage of the current scientific zeitgeist. We observe that
these motives rarely result in work that forwards the deep learning literature. We particularly
note the poor practice of ascribing work “deep learning” while not employing representation
learning principles.

This comprehensive review identified that literature at the intersection of deep learning and
water do not cover the used methods in detail. Most of the studies appear reluctant to give
model/architecture details that are vital to reproduce the proposed training pipeline. Combined
with the aforementioned dataset problems cause consistent barriers to reproducibility of work.
This overshadows the reported accuracy of studies and slows advancement in the deep learning
powered water field.

In contrast, some studies discuss unnecessary details over and over again in their manuscript.
Discussing how the most efficient number of hidden layers or hyper-parameters are found by
trial and error for many paragraphs without a hint of intuition, or discussing the optimal batch
size for many paragraphs do not appear as the authors use pertinent deep learning theory. Not
sharing intuition regarding technical choices also prevents the papers to reach their goal. There
are many papers utilizing LSTM networks, but a few discuss the rationale behind their decision.
One would at least expect a paper to describe why they choose LSTM networks over GRU
networks in their setting. While this instance needs a comparison of two similar RNN
implementations, it should also be noted that networks like GANs and DQNs find a very limited
place for themselves in the literature. Furthermore, researchers use networks like ELM, ENN,
and NAR in various tasks without sharing their relative success to more complex architectures
widely-used in state of the art deep learning models.

Ethics in DL Applications
Broadly, ethics are concerned with describing the appropriateness of an act; whether something
is “right” or “wrong” to do. Meanwhile, DL is a tool which can be used to produce algorithms
which automate prediction and decision-making. Thus, most ethical concerns of DL derive from
the central question: What will the DL application do? The ethical considerations of DL in water
are no exception. Take, for example, a DL application that predicts streamflow within an urban
catchment. By appearances, the act of streamflow prediction alone lacks any ethical character.
However, if the same tool is then used to make decisions in disaster mitigation (Demir et al.,
2018) or public planning, many questions with ethical dimensions arise (Ewing and Demir,
2020). What data were, and were not, used to develop the model? What biases exist in the
dataset? How do these biases affect decision-making and human lives, and do the decisions
reveal any discriminating behaviors? From this example, it is clear that the primary ethical
considerations for the application of DL in water should be concerned with how entities --
people, the environment, communities -- will be affected by DL in decision-making workflows.

Though powerful, these DL tools simultaneously expand the reach and speed of decision-
making, while also stripping away layers of context that would possibly be relevant to a humans’
decision-making process. However, many of the ethical decisions themselves in the water field
remain unchanged and are primarily distributional; who receives water services, and their level
of quality, and what level, and for whom, of risk is acceptable. These persistent ethical water
dilemmas must be resolved within the new paradigm of DL in water.
As revealed by this literature review, few DL applications in the water literature include
decision-making components. One paper, Rohmat et al. (2019), reviewed in this paper explicitly
states that their DL tool is integrated into a decision support system. This lack of attention to DL
in service of decision-making in water academia presents an opportunity for a new line of
research. It is also an opportunity to incorporate the work of other fields early, such as the well-
documented ethical concerns stemming from DL decision- and recommendation-engines in
social and civil applications (such as policing, criminal justice, and self-driving cars (Angwin,
Larson, Mattu, & Kirchner, 2016; O’Neil, 2016).) Further, a proliferation of AI Ethics
frameworks have been developed, reviewed here (Hagendorff, 2019; Jobin et al., 2019), as well
as numerous guidelines for applying and assessing algorithms in social and civil domains
(O’Reilly, 2013; Rahwan, 2017; Reisman, Schultz, Crawford, & Whittaker, 2018). These
guidelines stress a deep understanding of the task the algorithm is in service of, feedback on
algorithm performance, and rigorous assessment procedures.

The discussions of ethics in the context of DL are part of a continued conversation of ethics
generally. Questions of how to treat those in our communities, how to treat the environment,
what is the “right” priority, or priorities, are not questions exclusive to the AI/DL domain.
Rather, the new scale and speed provided by DL require the inspection of age-old ethical
questions in a new light.

Recommendations and Conclusions

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the recent application of deep neural networks as
novel solutions to tackle hydrological tasks and challenges. A total of 129 publications were
systematically selected for rigorous review and analysis as grouped by their application area.
Based on the statistical meta-analysis of journal publications dating between January 2018 to
March 2020, it was empirically observed that the average number of deep learning applications
per month in the water sector steadily increased in an exponential fashion. Further, the rapidly
increasing body of work from these publications show deep learning’s potential in a diversity of
water sector applications. Key issues and challenges that may constitute setbacks and hindrances
of deep learning adoption in the water industry have been identified and reported accompanied
by recommendations to persevere in spite of the logistical, computational, expertise-related, and
data-related challenges to its principled adoption. Based on the extent of this review and the
broad spectrum of application areas, we anticipate the water sector will continue to incorporate
deep learning at an accelerating rate and deep learning will play a key role in the future of water.
Deep learning-powered technologies opened up a plethora of application and research
opportunities to revolutionize hydrological science and workflow. In a bird’s eye view fashion,
key areas of innovation for future research include:
1. Automated Forecasting: As this review outlined, the majority of current deep learning
applications in the hydrological domain focus on forecasting of numerous parameters (e.g.
water level, discharge) given the problem’s suitability for machine learning. In the future,
efforts can be coordinated between agencies and research organizations to collaboratively
develop complementary models that will yield actionable and reliable information. These
models can be maintained and powered by a stream of real-time data influx to constitute the
future of decision-making systems and geographical information systems.
2. Published Datasets: Lack of deep learning ready datasets within the water field was stressed
in the previous section. The main problem caused by this absence of many datasets is that the
 research community does not build upon previous work in terms of constructing better neural
network architectures and moving the state of art to the next iteration. This inference is
supported by the fact that among the 30 papers related to flooding reviewed in this study
there are only a few that use a previously curated, labeled dataset. The result is many papers
are published that achieve the same task with almost identical methods but different data.
This absence implicitly causes redundancy in the field. We believe if more studies focus on
creating benchmark datasets that are open to researchers, both cumulativeness of the science
would be satisfied and deep learning powered modeling in water resources research would go
further in terms of generic applicability.
3. AI as a Service: As the popularity and usefulness of artificial intelligence tools increase, a
new research area came to prominence in the computer science field. This area is focused on
developing generalized and centralized web frameworks that can readily provide the means
to develop custom AI solutions through Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) systems. These
systems hold great potential for the hydrological community as they allow developers to
focus on designing and managing intelligent applications without the burden of infrastructure
maintenance and adjustment of computing resources. They can provide intuitive graphical
user interfaces to allow the development of hydrological deep learning applications by
connecting predefined and custom models with provided datasets.
4. Edge Computing: The main propeller in the creation of smart applications is the consistent
and diverse data flux. However, as the frequency and types of data resources expand, a
centralized approach to collect and analyze data simply may not be viable for multivariate
tasks. Furthermore, the costs associated with the transfer of large data from distributed
sensors are not trivial and may discourage stakeholders to increase sensor coverage and data
reporting interval. As a solution, edge computing offers a new perspective to process the data
on the sensor. There is extensive research on utilizing deep learning for the internet of things
through edge computing, which can allow the stakeholders of the water domain to innovate
novel applications with existing or low-cost sensor networks. As a tangible example, a
camera-equipped river monitoring sensor can employ deep learning to analyze pictures on
the edge to detect any foreign objects (e.g. tree, human) on the river, and transmit only the
useful information to a centralized system.
5. Intelligent Assistants: The massive amount of environmental and hydrological data makes it
challenging to efficiently and effectively extract required knowledge in a timely manner.
Manual efforts are often needed to analyze comprehensive raw data for decision-making
purposes. As a solution, intelligent assistants serve as voice-enabled knowledge engines that
can interpret a natural language question, apply human-like reasoning, and extract the desired
factual response out of curated data. These assistants can be integrated into various
communication channels for easy access including web systems, messaging applications (e.g.
Skype, Messenger, SMS), personal assistants (e.g. Google Assistant, Apple Siri), home
automation devices (e.g. Google Home, Amazon Alexa), augmented and virtual reality
systems (e.g. HoloLens, Magic Leap, Oculus Quest), and automated workflow systems. The
voice-enabled communication and immediate access to knowledge can facilitate hydrological
research as well as natural disaster preparedness and response (Sermet and Demir, 2018a).
6. Virtual and Augmented Reality: Incorporation of deep learning with virtual and augmented
reality environments provides a prominent research area due to its immersive nature that
allows effective analysis of complex environmental phenomena that is not feasible to be
orchestrated in real-life. For example, deep learning can power realistic flood simulations
 while mimicking human behavior to train first-responders, aid decision-makers, and educate
the public (Sermet and Demir, 2018b). Another use case may be guiding on-site personnel
that may require expertise, such as sensor maintenance, structural renovation, and field
experiments, through heads-up displays and deep learning-powered recognition and decision
support applications (Sermet and Demir, 2020).

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