Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726

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Journal of Hydrology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhydrol

Research papers

Data-driven rapid flood prediction mapping with

catchment generalizability
Zifeng Guo a, *, Vahid Moosavi a, João P. Leitão b
a
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland
b
Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), Switzerland

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

This manuscript was handled by Emmanouil Data-driven and machine learning models have recently received increasing interest to resolve the computational
Anagnostou, Editor-in-Chief, with the assis­ speed challenge faced by various physically-based simulations. A few studies have explored the application of
tance of Emad Hasan, Associate Editor these models to develop new, and fast, applications for fluvial and pluvial flood prediction, extent mapping, and
flood susceptibility assessment. However, most studies have focused on model development for specific catch­
Keywords:
ment areas, drainage networks or gauge stations. Hence, their results cannot be directly reused to other contexts
Pluvial flood prediction
unless extra data are available and the models are further trained. This study explores the generalizability po­
Data-driven modeling
Surrogate flood modeling tential of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as flood prediction models. The study proposes a CNN-based
model that can be reused in different catchment areas with different topography once the model is trained.
The study investigates two options, patch- and resizing-based options, to process catchment areas of different
sizes and different shapes. The results showed that the CNN-based model predicts accurately on “unseen”
catchment areas with significantly less computational time when compared to physically-based models. The
obtained results also suggest that the patch-based option is more effective than the resizing-based option in terms
of prediction accuracy. In addition, all experiments have shown that the prediction of flow velocity is more
accurate than water depth, suggesting that the water accumulation is more sensitive to global elevation infor­
mation than flow velocity.

1. Introduction and significantly accelerate the computational process compared with

Solving flow- and flood-related problems using data-driven and
machine learning models has recently become a research field receiving
growing attention. Compared to the conventional physically-based
models governed by systems of differential equations, data-driven
flood models can be considered as the “surrogate” which exhibits two
major advantages. First, data-driven models can produce relatively ac­
curate predictions without the need of having the full a priori knowledge
of the phenomena. The accuracy of the model is related to the amount,
quality, and diversity of data available. This feature suggests that, by
learning from the observational data, we can bypass the complexity
issue of physically-based models caused by the increasing number of
influential factors (e.g., Wang et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2020). Second,
data-driven flood models substitute the iterative process (i.e., the nu­
merical integration of differential equations) with non-iterative opera­
tions (such as the forward propagation of neural networks). Therefore,
data-driven models benefit from the parallel computing techniques
physically-based models. This feature is extremely important for appli­
cations that require a considerable number of simulations or real-time
predictions, for example, simulation-driven optimizations (e.g., Feng
et al., 2016; Mustafa et al., 2018) and animations (e.g., Ladický et al.,
2015).
1.1. Current status and challenges of data-driven flood modeling
A considerable number of studies have been conducted for data-
driven flood modeling using different methods such as decision trees
(Tehrany et al, 2013), logistic regressions (e.g., Ladicky el al., 2015;
Tehrany et al., 2017), support vector machines (e.g., Huang et al., 2014;
Tehrany et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020), and self-organizing maps (e.g.,
Zaghloul 2017; Leitão et al., 2018). These studies have shown that data-
driven techniques are suitable for a wide range of flow-related problems
with promising accuracy when sufficient data are available. However,
these learning methods require feature extractions when dealing with

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: guo@arch.ethz.ch (Z. Guo).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2022.127726
Received 16 September 2021; Received in revised form 25 January 2022; Accepted 10 March 2022
Available online 16 March 2022
0022-1694/© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
Z. Guo et al.
raster data such as elevation maps. The feature extraction can be
computationally expensive and may not be feasible for larger scale
problems (e.g., Zaghloul 2017; Leitão et al., 2018).
Recently, neural networks (NNs) have become a dominant method
for data-driven flow and flood modeling due to 1) the ability of NNs to
approximate strong and non-linear correlations, 2) the ability to process
raw raster data, and 3) the variety of NN’s architecture to explore. Many
studies have reported that NN-based models outperformed other
methods in terms of the prediction accuracy for the same task (e.g.,
Gebrehiwot et al., 2019; Bui et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2020). The studies
of NN-based models can be further differentiated into two directions.
The first direction adopts fully-connected networks and convolutional
neural networks (CNNs) for spatial flood predictions of catchment areas.
This direction typically predicts one pixel at a time using the surround
information of the pixels (e.g., Berkhahn et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2019;
Zhao et al., 2020; Bui et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020), or predict a large
area at once using image-to-image modeling techniques (Guo et al.,
2020a; Löwe et al., 2021). The second direction typically uses recurrent
neural networks (RNNs) to conduct long-term predictions for drainage
networks or catchment-level rainfall-runoff relations (e.g., Chang et al.,
2004; Chang et al., 2014; Chen et al., 2013; Tan et al., 2018; Kratzert
et al., 2019a; Kratzert et al., 2019b; Gude et al., 2020). An exception can
be found in Kabir et al. (2020) who used CNNs to process temporal data
that were encoded as matrixes. The rows of the matrixes represent the
time series while the columns represent the features.
The recent studies have demonstrated the promising potential of
data-driven flood modeling. However, most studies have focused on
specific catchment areas or drainage systems (e.g., Chen et al., 2013;
Chang et al., 2014; Bui et al., 2020; Kabir et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020),
and their results cannot be directly extrapolated and transferred to other
locations without adding more data and further training to the models.
Data-driven flood models that can generalize to different terrain inputs
are not fully explored. Regarding this problem, Mustafa et al. (2018)
showed that a neural network trained with artificially generated terrain
performed well on other “unseen” terrains that were produced by the
same generator. However, the neural network was trained with the user-
defined parameters of the generator rather than the raw elevation data.
Thus, the result cannot be easily extended to other applications. Ber­
khahn et al. (2019) trained different models for each of the catchment
areas and showed that the same neural network architecture has the
potential to be used in different locations. A step further was made by
Kratzert et al. (2019a) and Kratzert et al. (2019b) who investigated
recurrent neural networks for predicting catchment-level rainfall-runoff
relations. The networks were tested on basins that were not included in
the training data and outperformed the calibrated traditional hydrology
models. Löwe et al. (2021) trained a CNN model using raster data
sampled from the same city. The network was based on the concept of U-
net, which is a network architecture for image-to-image translation, and
has showed a promising accuracy on raster samples of the same city that
were not used as the training data.
The lack of data-driven models extrapolatable to “unseen” terrains
can be justified by two main reasons. First, many machine learning al­
gorithms require the input data to have the same dimensionality, which
means we need to develop a systematic representation for catchment
areas of different sizes or drainage networks of different topologies.
Second, such models require large amount of flood data to be available
as the training data. However, preparing such dataset is computationally
expensive due to the size and the spatial and temporal resolutions of
urban-scale flood simulations.
Despite these recent works, other type of predictions, such as surface
water depth and flow velocities of different catchment areas, have not
yet been well-studied. Therefore, researchers and urban planners still
lack proper models for large-scale simulation-intensive applications.
This situation emphasizes the need of exploring data-driven flood
models capable of accurate flood predictions on different terrain inputs.
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Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726
1.2. Objective: investigating the terrain generalizability of data-driven
flood models
In this study, we propose a data-driven pluvial flood prediction
model that can generalize to different terrain inputs. In other words,
once the model is trained, it can be used to different catchment areas
that are not included in the training data. The proposed model repre­
sents the pluvial flood prediction as an image-to-image translation task
that can be handled by CNNs. Compared to other machine learning al­
gorithms, CNNs offer two advantages: 1) the ability of learning spatial
features from the input data, and 2) the ability to avoid the explosive
growth of model’s complexity when handling raster (image) data. As
CNNs were shown effective to generalize on various rainfall events for
urban-scale inundation prediction (Guo et al., 2020a), we mainly focus
on the flood prediction of the same event in different catchment areas.
Compared with other CNNs-based studies which focus on specific loca­
tions (e.g., Zhao et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2020; Kabir et al., 2020), or
process one raster pixel as a time (e.g., Zhao et al., 2019; Zhao et al.,
2020; Khosravi et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020). Our study takes a step
further to handle different locations and simplify the prediction process
(i.e., raster-to-raster instead of raster-to-pixel). The main contributions
of our study can be summarized as follow:
1. A new data-driven flood prediction model capable to generalize to
different catchment areas, i.e., areas with different topography, and
to generate flood predictions in a few seconds with a promising ac­
curacy compared to physically-based simulation results.
2. Two different spatial discretization options to handle catchment
areas of different sizes, which can be used as references for further
research, and
3. A large pluvial flood dataset generated using a simplified physically-
based flood model that can contribute to other related flood pre­
diction studies.
2. Method and materials
2.1. Problem statement
This study focuses on the development of a data-driven flood pre­
diction model capable of terrain generalizability, which means once the
model is trained, it can be used on different catchment areas that were
not presented in the training data set. As a first step, we concentrate on
the generalizability to different terrain inputs and simplify the problem
by 1) neglecting other contributing factors such as surface types and
land uses to reduce the model’s complexity and the amount of data
required; 2) focusing on the maximum water depths and flow velocities
as they are the key factors for risk assessment and urban planning; and 3)
focusing on one rainfall event of approximately 100-year return period
to study whether the model successfully transfer the information learnt
from some catchments to other catchments.
Our study considers flood prediction as a supervised learning task in
which the prediction model is trained using input-output pairs. The in­
puts are elevation raster (i.e., spatial maps of terrain elevations) and the
outputs are flooding raster (i.e., spatial maps of maximum water depth
and flow velocity). After the training step, the model can predict the
maximum water depth and flow velocity from the new elevation data
that is fed as input. We implement such prediction model using CNNs to
utilize the spatial information of adjacent image pixels (raster cells).
However, most existing CNN models have relatively small input sizes (e.
g., 256 × 256 pixels) which are significantly smaller than the size of
catchment areas (e.g., 3,000 × 3,000 pixels). As it is not feasible to in­
crease the input size of CNNs to the size of catchment areas due to the
model’s complexity and the memory limitation of most graphic cards,
we propose two options to balance between information loss and model
implementation: the patch- and the resizing-based options.
Z. Guo et al.
Fig. 1. The receptive field of a layer is the number of pixels of the input layer that are “visible” from this layer. k represents kernel size, s is the stride size, and r is the
receptive field.
Fig. 2. The prediction model. Note that the not all layers are shown for visualization purpose.
2.1.1. Patch-based option
The patch-based option discretizes catchment areas to patches and
assembles the patch-level outputs to the final predictions. This option
was shown effective for describing large original objects (e.g., Masci
et al., 2015; Ronneberger et al., 2015). However, considering the in­
formation loss caused by the patch sampling, we chose a relatively large
patch size of 1,024 × 1,024 to preserve as much global information as
possible. Also, we over-sample the patches to reduce errors using
overlapping pixels (Guo et al., 2020a). During the experiment, we have
also tested other patch sizes for comparison purposes.
2.1.2. Resizing-based option
The resizing-based option down-samples large catchment areas, and
then up-samples the outputs to their original sizes. The purpose of this
option is to study whether CNNs can effectively handle resized inputs
and make accurate predictions as in other applications such as computer
visions (e.g., Badrinarayanan et al., 2017). The resizing-based option
preserves global elevation information but destroys local detailed pat­
terns, but the lost details can be re-generatable by synthetic up-sampling
methods (e.g., Chu and Thuerey, 2017). We choose a large input size
(1,024 × 1,024) to preserve as much local information as possible and to
make the two options comparable.
2.2. Model design
The CNN model is designed based on the structure of U-Net (Ron­
neberger et al., 2015), a neural network architecture that is character­
ized by the skip-connections between shallow and deep layers. The main
reason to use U-Net rather than other CNN architectures is to preserve
the detailed spatial patterns in the outputs while keeping the receptive
field as large as possible. The receptive field refers to the “visible pixels”
of the input layer for each output pixel (Luo et al., 2016). It corresponds
to the hydrological fact that the water accumulation in a small region is
the result of water flowing from larger areas (i.e., from upstream to
downstream). Larger receptive field allows the CNN model to learn from
the global elevation information rather than only from local terrain
patterns (Geirhos et al., 2019). Fig. 1 shows a diagram explaining the
concept of receptive field.
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Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726
The receptive field can be increased by 1) adding more network
layers and 2) using larger convolutional kernels. However, these two
strategies will “smooth out” the detailed spatial patterns for most CNN
architectures (Long et al., 2015). Although small convolutional kernels
can improve the output details (Badrinarayanan et al., 2017), using
small kernels is in contradiction with the goal to having a global view of
the input data. This issue is resolved by skip-connections as they bring
shortcuts between the input and output layers. In addition, the skip
connections reduce the difficulties to train deep CNNs and improve the
accuracy (He et al., 2016).
The structure of our CNN model is shown in Fig. 2, where the input is
a terrain raster with four image channels (elevation, slope, aspect, and
curvature) and the output is the corresponding flood predictions (water
depth and flow velocity). The model consists of an encoder and a
decoder. The encoder is a series of convolutional and max-pooling layers
which compress the input raster to arrays of smaller sizes. The decoder is
a series of up-sampling and convolutional layers which decompress the
compressed arrays to the output raster. For each up-sampling layer of
the decoder, its output array is concatenated with the array of the same
size produced by the encoder. The concatenated arrays are fed to the
successive layer of the up-sampling layers.
The number of layers of the CNN model depends on the size of the
input. The goal is to have the receptive field in the latent layer (the last
layer of the encoder) larger than the input size. The receptive field rn of
the n-th hidden layer of the encoder can be calculated using Eq. (1).
⎧
⎪
⎪
⎨ k1 if n = 1
rn = ∏n− 1 (1)
⎪
⎪ r + (k − 1) s if n>1
⎩ n− 1 n i
i=1
In the equation, kn, sn are the kernel size (the size of the convolu­
tional kernel) and the stride of the n-th hidden layer, respectively. For
max-pooling layers, k = s. Therefore, the larger the input size, the deeper
the network.
Based on this formulation, a good combination that efficiently in­
creases the receptive field of the encoder part is two convolutional layers
with k = 7 and s = 1 followed by one max pooling layer with k = 2 and
s = 2. For the decoder part, we used a symmetrical layer sequence and
Z. Guo et al.
Fig. 3. Spatial distribution of catchment areas that were categorized as training dataset (white) and validation and test datasets (blue). The red polygons represent
case studies sampled from the validation and test datasets.
Fig. 4. Terrain characteristics of the training, validation, and test datasets.
replace all max-pooling layers by up-sampling layers with k = 2. All
convolutional layers of the decoder part have a k = 3 in order to better
preserve detail spatial patterns. The activation functions for all except
the last convolutional layers are Leaky-ReLU (Maas et al., 2013). The
Leaky-ReLU function avoids the “vanishing gradient problem”
(Hochreiter, 1998) of the sigmoid functions and the dead neuron
problem of the rectified linear function (Nair and Hinton, 2010). The
output layer has no activation function and produces unbounded values.
The CNN models were implemented using Keras 2.2.2 (Chollet et al.,
2015) and Tensorflow 1.14.0 (Abadi et al., 2016), and were trained
using the Adam optimizer (Kingma and Ba, 2015) with a learning rate of
5 × 10− 5. The batch size for all training was two. We used a small batch
size due to the memory limitation of the available graphic card (a Nvidia
GTX 1080 Ti with 11 GB memory). The loss function for training the
models was mean squared loss. All no-data pixels were excluded from
the loss functions. For all models, we stopped the training process when
their test losses converge to stable values.
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Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726
2.3. Data source and data processing
The elevation data for this study were collected from the GeoVITe
geodata service of ETH Zurich (https://geovite.ethz.ch/). The data were
downloaded as 2 m raster tiles and were processed to catchment areas
using GIS software. The collected elevation data consist of two regions.
The first region is an area of approximately 90 km × 65 km around the
Canton of Zurich, Switzerland, containing 649 catchment areas. The
second region is located at the cities of Lausanne and Geneva,
Switzerland, containing seven catchment areas. The catchment areas of
the first region were randomly split into two sets that contain 433 and
216 catchment areas, respectively. The larger set was used as the
training dataset and the smaller set was used as the validation datasets.
All the catchment areas of the second region were used as the test
dataset. Fig. 3 shows the spatial distribution of the dataset, where
catchment areas with red boundaries belong to the validation and test
datasets. Fig. 4 reports the terrain characteristics of the datasets. It is
noteworthy that these characteristics show the average conditions of the
catchments, not representing detailed spatial patterns, and that the
Z. Guo et al. Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726

Table 1
The design rainfall event (approximately 100-year return period) used for the simulations.
Rainfall interval (min) 0–5 5–10 10–15 15–20 20–25 25–30 30–35 35–40 40–45 45–50 50–55 55–60
Rainfall intensity (mm/h) 24.1 26.8 30.7 37.0 50.1 161.4 65.6 42.1 33.4 28.6 25.3 23.0

rainfall characteristics of the different locations. The purpose for using

Table 2
the same event is to focus on the main factor (i.e., terrain elevations) and
Performance indicators used by the experiments.
maintain other numerical inputs constant. The rainfall intensity of the
Performance indicator Formula Range Optimal event is shown in Table 1.
score
The training data for the patch- and resizing-based options were
Modified index of d1 =
∑n ⃒⃒ ⃒
[0,1] 1 prepared differently. For the patch-based option, the training data were
agreement (d1) yi − y’ ⃒
1 − ∑n ( ⃒⃒ i=1 ⃒⃒ ⃒⃒ i ’ ⃒) patches (input-output pairs) randomly sampled from the catchment
i=1 yi − y + yi − y
⃒
√̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅ areas of the training dataset. Each patch contains three raster maps: the
RMSE ∑n ( ) 2 [0, 0
RMSE = i=1 yi − yi
’
+∞)
terrain elevations, the maximum water depth, and the maximum flow
n velocity. We oversampled the patches so that the total number of patch
pixels is three times larger than the total number of catchment pixels.
For the resizing-based option, the training data were raster maps pro­
Table 3 duced by resizing each of the catchment areas in the training dataset.
Different models tested in the validation experiments. The resizing was based on the longer side of the original catchment areas
Name Input size Receptive Kernel All layers shown Tested and the shorter side of the results were padded with 0 s to match the
field size as a sequence with input size of the CNNs. In addition, data augmentation techniques that
(concatenations flip and rotate the inputs were used to increase the number of training
are not shown) 1
data during the training process. The CNN models were trained using the
1024- 1,024 × 1,024 1588 7 convp(8); convp Both training set only and were evaluated using both validation and test sets.
k7 (16); convp(32); options
For both options, the training data were pre-processed before being
1024- 572 3 convp(64); convp
k3 (128); convp fed to the CNN models. The data pre-processing consists of three steps:
(256); 2 × conv 1) computing terrain features, including slope, aspect, and curvature,
(512); upconv from the raw elevation data xraw using the approach proposed by De
(256); upconv Smith et al. (2007); 2) rescaling the raw elevation xraw to c(max
(1 2 8); upconv
(xraw) − xraw, where max returns the maximum value and c is a constant;
(64); upconv(32);
upconv(16); and 3) concatenating the terrain features and the rescaled elevation to
upconv(8); conv raster maps of multiple image channels. All no-data pixels were filled
(2) with 0 s during data preprocessing. We trained the CNNs with and
512- 512 × 512 788 7 convp(16); convp The
without data preprocessing and found that, although the CNNs can learn
k7 (32); convp(64); patch-
512- 284 3 convp(128); based and converge using raw elevation data, the learning process was much
k3 convp(256); option faster using preprocessed training data. The test run also showed that
2 × conv(512); smaller c such as 0.01 performed better than larger values in terms of the
upconv(256); learning speed. This result is reported in the appendix.
upconv(128);
upconv(64);
upconv(32); 2.4. Model validation
upconv(16); conv
(2)
256- 256 × 256 388 7 convp(32); convp 2.4.1. Performance evaluation
k7 (64); convp(128); The performance of the CNN models was evaluated from the aspect
256- 140 3 convp(256); of prediction accuracy and computational time. The prediction accuracy
k3 2 × conv(512);
was assessed by comparing the ground truths and the prediction results,
upconv(256);
upconv(128);
using two commonly used performance indicators – modified index of
upconv(64); agreement (d1), and rooted mean squared error (RMSE). Both indicators
upconv(32); conv show the deviation of the prediction results from the ground truths, and
(2) the d1 value emphasizes on the relative errors (Willmott et al., 1985),
conv(n) represents one convolutional layer with the kernel size = 3; convp(n) is while the RMSE focuses on the absolute errors. The calculation of these
two convolutional layers with the kernel size specified in the network name, indicators is reported in Table 2. As the output of the CNN models
followed by one max pooling layer; upconv(n) is one up-sampling layer fol­ consists of two image channels – the maximum water depth and the
lowed by two convolutional layers with the kernel size = 3, and n is the number maximum flow velocity, the indicators were computed individually for
of output image channels. each of the output channels. The computation was conducted using
inundated pixels only, which means both the no-data and the non-
catchment characteristics were not used as inputs during the training inundated pixels were excluded. The inundated pixels were selected
process. by filtering the pixels where either water depth or flow velocity exceeds
The ground truth (i.e., maximum water depths and flow velocities) of the given thresholds. These thresholds were set to 0.05 m and 0.05 m/s.
all catchment areas were created by conducting simulations using Lastly, these performance indicators were individually computed for
CADDIES model (Guidolin et al., 2016). CADDIES is a cellular-automata- each of the catchments, rather than for the entire dataset.
based flood model capable of relatively fast pluvial flood simulations. The computational time was measured by the average prediction
All simulations were five hours length and were based on a designed time for each catchment area. For the resizing-based option, this time is
100-year event generated using the alternating block method (Te Chow equivalent to the time for processing one input raster. For the patch-
et al., 1988). Note that this rainfall event of approximately 100-year based option, the time depends on the size of the catchment area – i.
return period was used on the entire region without considering the e., how many patches are sampled. In our experiment, we sampled the

5
Z. Guo et al.
Fig. 5. Performance of different CNN models in the two proposed options.
patches by moving a patch-size × patch-size window horizontally and
vertically with a step of patch-size/2 until the entire catchment area is
reached. The patch-size depends on the input size of the CNN model, for
example, 1,024 × 1,024 pixels. In addition to the prediction time, the
time for necessary data preprocessing was also measured.
2.4.2. Validation experiments
The evaluation process described above was conducted in multiple
validation experiments to compare the performance of different options
(patch-based and resizing-based options) and different CNN model
variants. Each validation experiment produces a list of d1 and RMSE
values that show the performance of the corresponding model on all
catchments.
The CNN model variants that were tested in the validation experi­
ments were listed in Table 3. These variants were created by changing
the key variables of the CNN model – the input size and the kernel size.
Due to the long training process of each CNN model, we did not
exhaustively test all possible values. Rather, we selected three input
values and two kernel sizes, producing six model variants in total. These
model variants were named by input size-kernel size. In addition, to
reduce the potential information lost, we only tested the resizing-based
option with CNN models that have the largest input size (i.e.,
1,024 × 1,024 pixels).
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Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726
3. Results and discussions
3.1. Comparing two options and different model designs
The performance of the proposed options and different model vari­
ants is presented in Fig. 5. As can be seen, the performance of patch-
based option is significantly higher than the resizing-based option.
The worst-performing patch-based model shows a higher accuracy than
the best-performing resizing-based model. This result indicates that,
unlike other CNN-based image recognitions that work well on images of
different sizes, learning a flood model from resized rasters is difficult.
The loss of the detailed terrain information due to image resizing cannot
be compensated by having a global view of the terrain.
For the patch-based option, it is clear that models with larger
receptive field are more accurate for both water depth and flow velocity.
This trend can be better seen when different input size (such as 512 and
256) or different kernel size (such as k7 and k3) are compared. This
result indicates that the availability of terrain information in larger scale
is essential for flood predictions. Without sufficient receptive field, the
models would tend to “memorize” the training data rather than make
good generalization on the test data. Also, when the receptive field de­
creases, the accuracy drop is less significant for the flow velocity than for
the water depth, which indicates that the flow velocity is affected more
by the local elevation pattern than by the global terrain information,
thus making flow velocity easier to learn and to predict.
Z. Guo et al. Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726

Fig. 6. Scatter plots of simulation time (x-axis) against prediction times (y-axis). Each dot represents one catchment area.

Fig. 7. Left and middle: comparison of the two options’ RMSE on water depth and flow velocity, for all catchment areas. Right: relation between the water depth
RMSE and terrain elevation span, where WD represents water depth.

Fig. 8. Spatial plots of sample A. Top: simulated and predicted water depth. Bottom: simulated and predicted flow velocity.

7
Z. Guo et al. Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726

Fig. 9. Spatial plots of sample B. Top: simulated and predicted water depth. Bottom: simulated and predicted flow velocity.

Fig. 10. Spatial plots of sample C. Top: simulated and predicted water depth. Bottom: simulated and predicted flow velocity.

3.2. Time performance
The time comparison between the cellular-automata-based simula­
tions and CNN models is presented in Fig. 6 where each point represents
one catchment. The x-axes of the plots represent the simulation time and
the y-axes show the prediction time. The orange points consider both
prediction time and the time for necessary data preprocessing, whereas
the blue points consider only the prediction times. The plots clearly
show that CNNs achieved a significant improvement on computational
speed. Results that take approximately 20,000 s by simulations can be
obtained by 3 s using CNN based models. For the patch-based option, the
prediction time is linearly correlated with the simulation time. This is
due to the increasing number of patches sampled from larger catchment
areas. For the resizing-based option, the prediction time (blue) is con­
stant, and the data preprocessing time (orange) slightly increases for
catchment areas that cost more simulation time, explained by the
different size of the catchment areas. The baseline experiment shows
that the data-processing time remains constant if all elevation data have
same size.
3.3. Case studies
In addition to the mentioned performance indicators, we manually
selected four catchment areas from the validation dataset for case

8
Z. Guo et al. Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726

Fig. 11. Spatial plots of sample D. Top: simulated and predicted water depth. Bottom: simulated and predicted flow velocity.

Fig. A1. Sample 1 from the test dataset. Top: simulated and predicted water depth. Bottom: simulated and predicted flow velocity.

studies to assess the model’s spatial performance (their locations are
shown in Fig. 3). The case studies were selected as 1) they correspond to
relatively extreme RMSE values that represent the best- and worst-
performing scenarios for the CNN models, and 2) they represent
different terrain conditions (i.e., sample B and D are urban areas, and
sample A and C are rural areas). Fig. 7 shows the RMSE of all catchments
using both options, where the four selected cases are highlighted with
different symbols. Figs. 8–11 show the spatial rendering of the flood
predictions of the four case studies. The flood predictions were
generated using the patch-based option, and the non-flooded pixels
(water depth < 0.05 m or flow velocity < 0.05 m/s) were excluded from
the rendering. In the appendix we present more spatial renderings from
the test dataset.
Figs. 8 and 9 show two low-RMSE cases (sample A and B) that
correspond to rural (sample A) and urban (sample B) conditions,
respectively. A visual examination of the spatial rendering clearly shows
that both the water depth and flow velocity predictions are reasonably
accurate. On the other hand, the flood extent prediction (colored pixels)

9
Z. Guo et al. Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726

Fig. A2. Sample 2 from the test dataset. Top: simulated and predicted water depth. Bottom: simulated and predicted flow velocity.

Fig. A3. The effect of data-processing parameters on model convergence. The S, A, and C represent slope, aspect, and curvature, respectively.

10
Z. Guo et al.
of the downstream area in Fig. 9 shows a visual pattern that differs from
the simulation result. However, we would emphasize that this pattern
difference can be justified by the nonlinear colormap which gives more
color spectrum to smaller values than to larger values. As seen in the
error map of Fig. 9 (right column), despite the pattern difference, the
accuracy of the downstream area is high.
Figs. 10 and 11 show two high-RMSE cases (sample C and D) that
represent the worst-performing scenarios of the CNN model in rural
(sample C) and urban (sample D) conditions. Comparing with the pre­
vious low-RMSE cases, these high-RMSE cases have larger elevation
span and are characterized by the under predictions in the downstream
deep-water areas (the dark red areas of the water depth simulations).
Although the CNN model was able to recognize a relatively accurate
flood extent for these deep-water areas, the numerical accuracy of these
areas is substantially lower when compared with that of other areas. On
the other hand, despite the under predictions of the downstream areas,
the prediction accuracy of the upper stream areas remains high. This
suggests that the main challenge for the CNN model is to correctly
recognize the effect of water accumulation in large areas.
Despite the comparison of these cases has suggested that the larger
the catchment elevation range the lower the prediction accuracy, when
all catchments are taken into account, no clear relationship between this
terrain feature and the prediction accuracy is observed (right-hand side
plot of Fig. 7). In both path- and resizing-options, one can see (left and
middle plots in Fig. 7) that the prediction accuracy is variable
throughout the catchment area. This may indicate that the generaliz­
ability of the model and its prediction accuracy can be improved if a
larger training dataset is used.
4. Conclusions, limitations, and future works
This study presented a data-driven approach for fast flood prediction
using CNNs that is able to generalize on different catchment areas and
topographies. The study consists of two experiments that explored
different methods for processing catchment areas larger than the input
size of CNNs. The results have shown that CNNs exhibit a promising
ability to generalize the information learnt from the training data to
other unseen terrains, suggesting a potential to serve as the rapid sur­
rogate model for flood predictions of different scenarios. The results of
the experiments also showed that CNN models with larger receptive
field tend to have higher accuracy than models with small receptive
field. This suggests that water accumulation is sensitive to the global
patterns of the catchment area and the prediction accuracy depends on
how much global information is available. This conclusion was also
reported by Tsubaki and Kawahara (2013).
On the other hand, several drawbacks and limitations exist and
remain as possible future research directions. The first drawback is that
our experiment performed holdout validations rather than k-fold cross
validations. This can be explained by the limitations on available
computational power. Compared with the holdout validations, k-fold
cross validations smooth out the results and avoid highly misleading
results. However, we considered this drawback acceptable as 1) the goal
of this study was not to conduct a benchmark test which compares the
performance of our model with other models using a specific dataset, 2)
we have trained multiple models which help to avoid outliers, and 3) we
had a relatively large dataset compared with other studies (as each
catchment area produces multiple training samples), which compen­
sates for the lack of cross validations. The second drawback is that we
have simplified the problem and only focused on the main contributing
factor (i.e., the elevation). Other influential factors such as land cover
and spatial distributions of precipitation intensities were neglected. This
decision was made to reduce the model’s complexity and the amount of
data required for the investigation. Therefore, future investigations are
still required before applying this type of flood models to real applica­
tions. Another limitation of the presented model is that the prediction
accuracy can still be further improved. The mispredictions in some of the
11
Journal of Hydrology 609 (2022) 127726
catchments suggest that the major challenge is how to recognize the
water accumulations from large regions. Possible solutions for this issue
include considering larger training dataset, oversampling the deep-
water regions, and modifying the loss functions to gain more weights
for the deep-water regions. Lastly, our study was conducted using
CADDIES as the flood data provider and therefore the accuracy was
highly depended on the performance of the CADDIES. However, we
would like to clarify that the goal was to investigate whether data-driven
models can produce results as good as that of physically-based models.
The reliability issue of data-driven predictions will be addressed by
training with observational data in future works.
As of future works, the systematically encoding of catchment areas of
arbitrary sizes and shapes remains a challenge. This issue was handled
by the patch- and resizing-based options in our experiments, which
showed that the former performed significantly better than the letter on
both validation and test dataset. However, other possible methods that
worth to explore include testing new neural network architecture, or
sampling patches based on flow movement rather than spatial locations
(e.g., Chu and Thuerey, 2017). Another interesting direction of future
research would be to estimate the flow dynamic based on input con­
straints such as spatial rainfall intensity. Also, the rapid development of
sensor networks has made it possible to collect data by crowdsourcing
methods (Zheng et al., 2018) or computer vision techniques (e.g., Moy
de Vitry et al., 2019; Gebrehiwot et al., 2019), opening new possibilities
to produce observational flood data to be used in the training step of
data-driven flood prediction models.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Zifeng Guo: Data curation, Writing – original draft, Conceptualiza­
tion, Methodology, Visualization. Vahid Moosavi: Conceptualization,
Methodology. João P. Leitão: Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing
– review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
This study was funded by the China Scholarship Council grant
201706090254.
Data accessibility
The elevation and simulation data of the catchment areas used by
this study can be obtained from the data repository (Guo et al., 2020b)
hosted by the Research Collection of ETH Zurich with DOI link 10.3929/
ethz-b-000453305.
Appendix
Figs. A1 and A2 show two samples from the test dataset. The terrains
of the test dataset were not included in the training data and were
collected from regions far from where training data were collected. As
seen, despite the “unfamiliar” terrains, the accuracy of the CNN model
was promising.
As mentioned in Section 4.2, several tests were made to train CNN
models with and without terrain features. These tests were made using
patches sampled from several catchment areas. The results of these tests
are presented as loss curves in Fig. A3, in which the left plot shows the
result of different c values, and the right plot shows the result of different
terrain features. It is clear from the left plot that the model converges
faster as the c decreases. However, the improvement on convergence
speed becomes less significant when c < 0.01. The right plot suggests
that models using multiple features converge faster than those using one
Z. Guo et al.
feature or those without any feature.
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