Case Study of Discharge Modeling for Nissan River in Halmstad Municipality

Abstract: Changes in precipitation patterns, temperature, and other climatic variables have been shown to modify thehydrological cycle and hydrological systems, potentially resulting in a shift in river runoff behavior and an increasedrisk of floods. There have been several instances of devastating floods throughout Europe’s history, which haveresulted in devastation and enormous economic losses. As a result of the effects of climate change, floods areoccurring more frequently in Sweden as well as across Europe. Research on the subject of flood prediction has beengoing on for decades, where particularly data-driven models have advanced in recent years. This study examinedtwo different machine learning (data-driven) models for forecasting river discharge in the Nissan River: Linearregression and Random Forrest regression (RFR), with the use of ECMWF Reanalysis v5 ( ERA5 ) data and historicaldischarge data. The Linear regression model yielded a r2 score of 0.45 and could not be considered an acceptablemodel. The RFR model had a r2 score of 0.71. This implies, given ERA5 reanalysis data, that one might generatea moderately performing machine learning model for Nissan river. An additional investigation was carried out,to see if the trained model could be used with EC-EARTH CMIP6 future projection. The findings resulting fromapplying the EC-EARTH CMIP6 future data on the trained RFR indicated too many uncertainties, necessitatingmore investigation before any conclusions can be drawn.