Physics-guided Emulators Reveal Resilience and Fragility under Operational Latencies and Outages

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Hauptverfasser: Dubey, Sarth, Ghosh, Subimal, Bhatia, Udit
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Dubey, Sarth
Ghosh, Subimal
Bhatia, Udit
author_facet Dubey, Sarth
Ghosh, Subimal
Bhatia, Udit
contents Reliable hydrologic and flood forecasting requires models that remain stable when input data are delayed, missing, or inconsistent. However, most advances in rainfall-runoff prediction have been evaluated under ideal data conditions, emphasizing accuracy rather than operational resilience. Here, we develop an operationally ready emulator of the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) that couples long- and short-term memory networks with a relaxed water-balance constraint to preserve physical coherence. Five architectures span a continuum of information availability: from complete historical and forecast forcings to scenarios with data latency and outages, allowing systematic evaluation of robustness. Trained in minimally managed catchments across the United States and tested in more than 5,000 basins, including heavily regulated rivers in India, the emulator reproduces the hydrological core of GloFAS and degrades smoothly as information quality declines. Transfer across contrasting hydroclimatic and management regimes yields reduced yet physically consistent performance, defining the limits of generalization under data scarcity and human influence. The framework establishes operational robustness as a measurable property of hydrological machine learning and advances the design of reliable real-time forecasting systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18535
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physics-guided Emulators Reveal Resilience and Fragility under Operational Latencies and Outages
Dubey, Sarth
Ghosh, Subimal
Bhatia, Udit
Artificial Intelligence
Reliable hydrologic and flood forecasting requires models that remain stable when input data are delayed, missing, or inconsistent. However, most advances in rainfall-runoff prediction have been evaluated under ideal data conditions, emphasizing accuracy rather than operational resilience. Here, we develop an operationally ready emulator of the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) that couples long- and short-term memory networks with a relaxed water-balance constraint to preserve physical coherence. Five architectures span a continuum of information availability: from complete historical and forecast forcings to scenarios with data latency and outages, allowing systematic evaluation of robustness. Trained in minimally managed catchments across the United States and tested in more than 5,000 basins, including heavily regulated rivers in India, the emulator reproduces the hydrological core of GloFAS and degrades smoothly as information quality declines. Transfer across contrasting hydroclimatic and management regimes yields reduced yet physically consistent performance, defining the limits of generalization under data scarcity and human influence. The framework establishes operational robustness as a measurable property of hydrological machine learning and advances the design of reliable real-time forecasting systems.
title Physics-guided Emulators Reveal Resilience and Fragility under Operational Latencies and Outages
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18535