Accepted Manuscript

Review papers

Applications of hybrid Wavelet-Artificial Intelligence models in hydrology. A

review

Vahid Nourani, Aida Hosseini Baghanam, Jan Adamowski, Ozgur Kisi

PII: S0022-1694(14)00242-X
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.03.057
Reference: HYDROL 19515

To appear in: Journal of Hydrology

Received Date: 21 August 2013

Revised Date: 16 February 2014
Accepted Date: 24 March 2014

Please cite this article as: Nourani, V., Hosseini Baghanam, A., Adamowski, J., Kisi, O., Applications of hybrid
Wavelet-Artificial Intelligence models in hydrology. A review, Journal of Hydrology (2014), doi: http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.03.057

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1 Applications of hybrid Wavelet-Artificial Intelligence models in hydrology. A

2 review.

3 Vahid Nourani
1
4 Associate Prof., Dept. of Water Resources Eng., Faculty of Civil Eng., Univ. of Tabriz, Iran

5 E–mail: vnourani@yahoo.com, vnourani@umn.edu

6 Tel.: +98–914–403–0332; Fax: +98–411–334–4287

7 Aida Hosseini Baghanam

8 Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Water Resources Eng., Faculty of Civil Eng., Univ. of Tabriz, Iran

9 E-mail: hosseinibaghanam@gmail.com

10 Jan Adamowski

11 Assistant Prof., Dept. of Bioresource Eng., McGill Univ., Quebec, Canada

12 E–mail: jan.adamowski@mcgill.ca

13 Ozgur Kisi

14 Professor, Eng. Faculty, Canik Basari University, Samsun, Turkey

15 E–mail:okisi@basari.edu.tr

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

1
Corresponding author

1
23

List of used abbreviations

Ant Colony Optimization ACO

Artificial Intelligence AI
Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System ANFIS
Artificial Neural Network ANN
Auto Regressive AR
Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average ARIMA
ARIMA with exogenous input ARIMAX
Continues Wavelet Transform CWT
Discrete Wavelet Transform DWT
Daubechies order n wavelet dbn
Genetic Algorithm GA
Gene-Expression Programming GEP
Genetic Programming GP
Groundwater Level GWL
Linear Regression LR
Moving Average MA
Mean Absolute Error MAE
Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline MARS
Multi-Layer Perceptron MLP
Multiple Linear Regression MLR
Neuro Fuzzy NF
Neural Network NN
Particle Swarm Optimization PSO
Root Mean Square Error RMSE
Self-Organizing Map SOM
Standard Precipitation Index SPI
Sediment Rating Curve SRC
Singular Spectrum Analysis SSA
Suspended Sediment Concentration SSC
Suspended Sediment Load SSL
Sea Surface Temperature SST
Support Vector Machine SVM
Support Vector Regression SVR
Wavelet-ANFIS WANFIS
Wavelet-Artificial Neural Network WANN
Wavelet-Bootstrapping ANN WBANN
Wavelet-Generalized Regression NN WGRNN
Wavelet Modeling Framework WMF
Wavelet Multi-Resolution Analysis WMRA
Wavelet-Neuro Fuzzy WNF
Wavelet-Regression WR
Wavelet-Volterra WVC
24

2
25 Abstract

26 Accurate and reliable water resources planning and management, ensuring a sustainable use of

27 watershed resources cannot be achieved without precise and reliable models. Notwithstanding

28 the highly stochastic nature of hydrological processes, the development of models capable of

29 describing such complex phenomena continue unabated. Shedding light upon the modeling of

30 complex phenomena thank to a thorough overview of the literature, current research, and

31 expanding research horizons enhances the potential for accurate and well-conceived models.

32 Despite the obscurity involved in processes, recent decades have seen remarkable progress in the

33 ability to generate accurate hydrologic models. Among various conceptual and black box models

34 developed over this period, hybrid wavelet and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based models have

35 been amongst the most promising in simulating hydrologic processes. The present review

36 focuses on defining hybrid modeling, the advantages of such combined models, as well as the

37 history and potential future of their application in hydrology to predict important processes of the

38 hydrologic cycle. Over the years, the use of wavelet-AI models in hydrology has steadily

39 increased and attracted interest given the method’s robustness and accuracy. This is attributable

40 to wavelets’ great usefulness in multi-resolution analysis, de-noising, and edge effect detection

41 over a signal as well as AI’s strong capability in optimization, adaption and prediction of

42 process.

43 Key words: Hydro-climatology; Black box model; Artificial Intelligence; Wavelet transform; Hybrid

44 model.

45 1. Introduction

46 Characterized by high complexity, dynamism and non-stationary, hydrological and hydro-

47 climatologic forecasting has always presented a challenge to hydrologists who recognize its

3
48 essential role in environmental and water resources management as well as in water-related

49 disaster mitigation. Recent years have seen an exponential rise in the number of scientific

50 approaches applied to hydrologic modeling and forecasting, including the particularly popular

51 ‘data-based’ or ‘data-driven’ approaches. Such modeling approaches involve mathematical

52 equations drawn not from the physical process in the watershed but from an analysis of

53 concurrent input and output time series (Solomatine and Ostfeld, 2008). Such models can be

54 defined on the basis of connections between the system state variables (input, internal and output

55 variables) with only a limited number of assumptions being made regarding the physical

56 behavior of the system. Typical examples of data-driven models are rating curves, the unit

57 hydrograph method and various statistical models (Linear Regression; LR, multi-linear, Auto

58 Regressive Integrated Moving Average; ARIMA) and methods of machine learning. The

59 conventional black box time series models such as ARIMA, ARIMA with exogenous input

60 (ARIMAX) and Multiple Linear Regressions (MLR) are linear models and assume stationarity of

61 the dataset. Therefore, such models are unable to handle non-stationarity and non-linearity

62 relations involved in hydrological processes. Consequently, during recent decade, an immense

63 desire to propose models with the capacity to model non-linear and non-stationary processes has

64 appeared among hydrologists.

65 The data-driven methods of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have shown great ability in modeling and

66 forecasting non-linear hydrological processes and offer effective ways to handle large amounts

67 of dynamicity and noise concealed in datasets. Such properties of AI-based models are well

68 suited to hydrological modeling problems.

69 Numerous AI tools or techniques have been used, including versions of search optimization,

70 mathematical optimization, as well as logic-, classification-, statistical learning- and probability-

4
71 based methods (Luger, 2005). In particular, three subsets of AI have been widely used in the

72 hydro-climatologic and environmental fields as:

73 1) Evolutionary computation: A branch of optimization methods includes swarm

74 intelligence algorithms such as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO; Dorigo et al., 1996) or Particle

75 Swarm Optimization (PSO; Kennedy and Eberhart, 1995) and evolutionary algorithms such

76 as Genetic-Algorithms (GA; Goldberg, 2000), Gene-Expression Programming (GEP),

77 and Genetic-Programming (GP; Koza, 1992).

78 2) Fuzzy logic: Fuzzy systems (Zadeh, 1965) can be used for uncertain reasoning, which provide

79 a logic perspective in AI techniques.

80 3) Classifiers and statistical learning methods: These models employ statistical and machine-

81 learning approaches. The most widely used classifiers are Neural Networks (NNs; Haykin,

82 1994), kernel methods such as the Support Vector Machine (SVM; Vapnik, 1995), k-nearest

83 neighbor algorithms such as Self-Organizing Map (SOM; Kohonen, 1997), Gaussian mixture

84 model, naive Bayes classifier, and decision tree. NNs, the predominant AI method are used in

85 hydrology via two types: (i) supervised, including acyclic or feed-forward NNs (where the signal

86 passes in only one direction) and recurrent NNs (which allow feedback), and (ii) unsupervised

87 (e.g., SOM).

88 Among the broader science applications of AI methods, GA, GP, Fuzzy, NNs, and SVM are

89 widely used in different fields of hydrology. Since their emergence in hydrology, the efficient

90 performance of AI techniques as data-driven models has been proven and reported over a wide

91 range of hydrological processes (e.g., precipitation, stream-flow, rainfall-runoff, sediment load,

92 groundwater, drought, snowmelt, evapotranspiration, water quality, etc.). The number of

93 researchers active in this area has seen a considerable increase over recent times, as has the

5
94 number of publications. In this way, several dozen successful applications for hydrological

95 processes modeling (e.g., stream-flow, rainfall-runoff, sediment, groundwater, water quality)

96 using ANN, Fuzzy, GP, GA, SVM have been reported, which some examples have been briefly

97 listed in Table 1.

98 Despite the flexibility of AI-based methods in modeling hydrological processes, they present

99 some drawbacks when facing highly non-stationary responses, i.e., which vary over a wide scale

100 of frequencies, from hourly to multi-decadal. In such instances of ‘seasonality’, a lack of

101 input/output data pre/post-processing, may not allow AI models to adequately handle non-

102 stationary data. Here hybrid models which combine data pre/post-processing scheme with AI

103 techniques can play an auxiliary role.

104 Hybrid models have been developed to combine the strengths of data-based and conceptual

105 models and offer scope for dealing with problems associated with a lack of physical

106 understanding of the complex hydrological process. Hybrid hydrological models may take

107 advantage of black box (here AI-based) models and their ability to efficiently describe observed

108 data in statistical terms, as well as other prior information, concealed in observed records. The

109 hybrid models discussed here represent the joint application of AI-based methods with wavelet

110 transform to enhance overall model performance.

111 As an advance in signal processing, wavelet transform can reliably obviate AI model

112 shortcomings in dealing with non-stationary behavior of signals. A mathematical technique

113 useful in numerical analysis and manipulation of multidimensional signal sets, wavelet analyses

114 provides a time-scale representation of the process and of its relationships. Indeed, the main

115 property of the wavelet transform is ability to provide a time-scale localization of process. As a

116 progress in signal processing, wavelet transform has attracted much attention since its theoretical

6
117 development in 1984 (Grossman and Morlet, 1984). A number of recent hydrological studies

118 have implemented wavelet analysis (e.g., Adamowski and Sun, 2008, 2010; Kim et al., 2003;

119 Kisi, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Nourani et al., 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011; Maheswaran and Khosa,

120 2012a; Partal and Kisi, 2007; Sang, 2012; Tiwari and Chatterjee, 2010; Zhou et al., 2008).

121 Wavelet transform is applicable in extracting nontrivial and potentially useful information, or

122 knowledge, from the enormous data sets available in experimental sciences (historical records,

123 reanalysis, global climate model simulations, etc.). Providing explicit information in a readable

124 form, it can be used to solve diagnostic, classification or forecasting problems. In a review of the

125 applications of wavelet transform to hydrologic time series modeling, Sang (2013a) highlighted

126 the multifaceted information that can be drawn from such analysis: characterization and

127 understanding of hydrologic series’ multi-temporal scales, identification of seasonalities and

128 trends, and data de-noising. Therefore, the ability of wavelet transform to decompose non-

129 stationary signals into sub-signals at different temporal scales (levels) is helpful in better

130 interpreting hydrological processes (Adamowski, 2008a, 2008b; Adamowski et al., 2009; Kisi,

131 2010; Mirbagheri et al., 2010; Nason and Von Sachs, 1999; Sang, 2012).

132 Depending on wavelet and AI methods’ individual capacities, it can be inferred that a hybrid

133 model comprised of both would simultaneously enjoy the advantages of both techniques. The

134 combined Wavelet-AI approach is a sound and powerful methodology, grounded on both

135 wavelet transform and various AI modeling techniques. It allows the construction of tractable

136 joint models with such broad applications in hydrology as de-noising, optimization, remediation

137 of active Artificial NN (ANN) functions, as well as hydrological process forecasting. In the latter

138 case, wavelet-AI models have been enthusiastically adopted by hydrologists, as the combination

139 allows for a detailed elucidation of signals, making the hybrid method an effective implement for

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140 predicting hydrological phenomena. In forecasting tasks, the hybrid wavelet-AI method follows

141 a two-step procedure (Fig. 1):

142 (i) Use of the wavelet transform to pre-process input data. This includes providing a

143 time-frequency representation of a signal at different periods in the time domain, as

144 well as considerable information about the physical structure of the data, and

145 (ii) Extraction of features from the main signal to serve as AI inputs, and allow the full

146 model to process the data.

147 Selections of efficient mother wavelet and decomposition level are two important issues through

148 the first step. Appropriate choosing of the mother wavelet constitutes the most important

149 decision associated with the first step; both in the case of discrete and continuous wavelet

150 transforms (DWT and CWT, respectively). CWT and DWT construct a time-frequency

151 representation in the form of a continuous or discrete signal, respectively. Detailed analyses

152 regarding the performance of different mother wavelets in hydrological simulations have led to

153 the conclusion that to determine the ideal mother wavelet for a given problem a variety of mother

154 wavelets should be tested through a trial and error process (Maheswaran and Khosa, 2012a;

155 Nalley et al., 2012; Nourani et al., 2011; Sang, 2012). Nevertheless, similarity in shape between

156 the mother wavelet and the raw time-series proved the best guideline in choosing a reliable

157 mother wavelet. Generally, mother wavelets with a compact support form (e.g., Daubechies-1,

158 Haar; and Daubechies-4, db4) are most effective in generating time localization characteristics

159 for time series which have a short memory and short duration transient features. In contrast,

160 mother wavelets with a wide support form (e.g., Daubechies-2, db2) yield reliable forecasts for

161 time series with long term features (Maheswaran and Khosa, 2012a).

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162 Since DWT starts with a discrete set of data and considers a dyadic set of scales, it is compatible

163 with the discrete observation of hydrological signals. In order to study the signal, discretisation

164 comes first, and as a result decomposition levels come followingly. Although appropriate

165 selection of the maximum scale is also important in CWT, it plays essential role in DWT due to

166 decomposition procedure and extraction of dominant sub-series which could not be depicted as

167 easy as possible in CWT. Therefore, along with mother wavelet type selection, determination of

168 the appropriate decomposition level (scale) is another important sub-step within the first step

169 when DWT is applied (Fig 1.). In the early studies, the optimum decomposition level was usually

170 determined through a trial-and-error process, but afterwards a formula which relates the

171 minimum level of decomposition, L, to the number of data points within the time series Ns, was

172 introduced in literatures as (Aussem et al., 1998; Nourani et al., 2009b; Wang and Ding, 2003):

173 L = int log N s  (1)

174 Later, Nourani et al. (2011) criticized the outcome of this formula, stating that, having been

175 derived for fully autoregressive (AR) signals; it only considers time series length, without paying

176 any attention to seasonal effects. Since many seasonal characteristics may be embedded in

177 hydrological signals, a precise insight into the process under study and attention to the

178 periodicity of the process might be helpful in the selection of an appropriate decomposition level

179 for dyadic DWT analysis. Decomposition level l contains l details and as an example in case of

180 daily modeling denotes 2n-day mode where n=1, 2, …, l (e.g., 21-day mode, 22-day mode, 23-day

181 mode which is nearly weekly mode, 24-day mode, 25-day mode which is nearly monthly mode,

182 etc.), therefore, the seasonal and scale dependency of the process could be handled by the model.

183 Depending on the wavelet type, the decomposition level and the type of AI method applied,

184 several approaches can be examined according to the aim in developing the hybrid wavelet-AI

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185 model. In this context, AI methods can be seen to fall into three basic categories: optimization,

186 logic, classification and statistical learning and based on the utilization of AI over one of these

187 three fields, different purposes from hybrid wavelet-AI model can be inferred. Generally the

188 collective application of optimization methods and wavelet analysis leads to recognition of

189 optimal inputs for AI models (Kuo et al., 2010a, 2010b; Wang et al., 2011a). Feature extraction

190 and classification of dominant inputs to be used in forecasting (Hsu and Li, 2010; Nourani et al.,

191 2013) along with seasonality detection (Li, 2011; Nourani and Parhizkar, 2013; Nourani et al.,

192 2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2012) as well as noise reduction/ removal approach from the hydrologic

193 time series (Campisi et al., 2012; Guo et al., 2011) are important elements contributing to better

194 forecasting for future planning through hybrid wavelet-AI models.

195 Due to the variety of information involved in hydrologic processes and need to have accurate

196 forecasting models, several wavelet-AI models have been developed recently. Indeed hybrid

197 wavelet-AI models establish the advantage of using wavelets for improving forecasting

198 efficiencies. Given that in such a rapidly evolving field it is vital to survey what has been done

199 with wavelet-AI models and where current research trends are taking this field of study, review

200 articles can represent an effective tool to follow and approach the many facets of this scientific

201 domain. Several review papers (See Table 2) concerning particular sub-sets of AI models used in

202 hydrology or specifically on hydrological modeling have answered this need (Abrahart et al.,

203 2012; ASCE, 2000; Dawson and Wilby, 2001; Kalteh et al., 2008; Maier and Dandy, 2000;

204 Maier et al., 2010; Solomatine and Ostfeld, 2008). While general reviews of wavelet applications

205 in hydrology (Kumar and Foufoula-Georgiou, 1997; Labat, 2005; Schaefli et al., 2007; Sang,

206 2013a) have surveyed wavelet analysis methods (See Table 2), no reviews have centered on the

207 specific use of wavelet-AI models. Maier et al., (2010) in their review paper on methods used in

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208 developing NNs for the prediction of water resource variables in river systems suggested that

209 “…work should continue on the development and evaluation of hybrid model architectures that

210 attempt to draw on the strengths of alternative modeling approaches. Given the amount of work

211 that has already been done in this area, a review of this emerging field of research would seem

212 timely.”

213 The lack of review papers evaluating the simultaneous application of AI models and wavelet

214 concept in hydrology led to the collective preparation of the current review paper, which is an

215 updated assessment of coupled AI and wavelet applications in various fields of hydrology. The

216 advances in hydrological modeling and simulation achieved through wavelet-AI models have

217 largely outstripped conventional models in terms of performance, and led to a dramatic increase

218 in associated research and resulting publication numbers since 2003 (Fig. 2). While such

219 publications remained low from 2003 through until 2007, they then saw a 10-fold increase over

220 the next two years, which represents a turning point in wavelet-AI research history. Articles up

221 to 2007 played an innovator role, with the paper of Labat et al. in 2004 representing the

222 pioneering work of wavelet application to hydrology (with 152 citations in Scopus) and Labat’s

223 review on the wavelet concept (with 114 citations) providing further incentive to research on the

224 application of wavelet-AI systems in hydrological modeling (Labat, 2005). In 2006, Partal and

225 Küçük (with 44 citations) showed the merits of wavelet trend analysis in determining possible

226 trends in annual total precipitation series, while the work of Cannas et al. (with 38 citations)

227 further developed the hybrid wavelet-AI model. With the introduction of interesting applications

228 of wavelet in hydrology and by aforementioned pioneers, desire to develop wavelet-AI models

229 through the next years aspired. In this regard, the paper of Partal and Kisi (2007) on precipitation

230 forecasting via wavelet and Neuro-Fuzzy (NF) conjunction model (with 50 citations) as well as

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231 review paper of Schaefli et al. (2007) might provoke the researchers to ponder on various aspects

232 of wavelet-AI models. Such researches might be an appropriate interpretation to raising trend of

233 Fig. 2 around 2007. Subsequently, the flourish of wavelet-AI approach as a sufficient modeling

234 approach led to the vast surge of papers in several fields of hydrology, climatology and

235 environmental researches, which can be inferred from diagram of Fig. 2.

236 The principal objectives of the current review paper are to comprehensively categorize wavelet-

237 AI systems, enumerate their novel applications in hydrology along with the benefits so derived.

238 As part of this process, detecting trends in wavelet-AI model design and application in the face

239 of outstanding challenges, can inform the planning of a consistent research agenda for future

240 wavelet-AI modeling. While this review skims technical or historical accounts of wavelet-AI

241 models, it focuses on their extensive use in hydro-climatology, and further restricts itself to the

242 main hydrologic parameters of interest, i.e., (i) precipitation, (ii) stream-flow, runoff, (iii)

243 rainfall-runoff, (iv) sediment, (v) groundwater, (vi) miscellaneous: drought, snowmelt,

244 evapotranspiration, water quality, wave height, etc. These selected parameters of review were

245 drawn from a review of NN hydrological modeling undertaken by the ASCE Task Committee

246 (ASCE, 2000). The present sources consulted were drawn the Scopus abstract and citation

247 databases (www.scopus.com). Conference proceedings are not included in this review. Details of

248 the selected papers, including year of publication, authors, AI methods used and variables

249 predicted are given in Table 3. This is followed by sections on the basic concepts of wavelet

250 transform (Section 2), and the applications of hybrid models in various fields of hydrology

251 (Section 3). Summary and suggestions for future avenues of research are presented in the last

252 sections of the paper.

253

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254 2. Wavelet transform

255 The wavelet transform has increased in usage and popularity in recent years since its inception in

256 the early 1980s, yet still does not enjoy the wide spread usage of the Fourier transform.

257 However, Fourier analysis has a serious drawback: a signal’s Fourier transform into the

258 frequency domain results in the loss of time information, such that it becomes impossible to tell

259 when a particular event took place. In contrast, wavelet analysis allows the use of long time

260 intervals when more precise low-frequency information is needed, and shorter regions when

261 high-frequency information is of interest.

262 In the field of earth sciences, Grossmann and Morlet (1984), who worked especially on

263 geophysical seismic signals, introduced the wavelet transform application. A comprehensive

264 literature survey of wavelet use in the geosciences can be found in Foufoula-Georgiou and

265 Kumar (1995) and most recent contributions are cited by Labat (2005). As there are many good

266 books and articles introducing the wavelet transform, this paper will not delve into the theory

267 behind wavelets and only present the main concepts of the transform; recommended literature for

268 the wavelet novice includes Mallat (1998) or Labat et al. (2000).

269 The time-scale wavelet transform of a continuous time signal, x(t), is defined as (Mallat, 1998):

1 t −b
+∞
270 T (a, b ) =
a
∫
−∞
g∗
 a 
 x(t ).dt (2)

271 where

272 a is a dilation factor,

273 b is the temporal translation of the function g(t), which allows the study of the signal

274 around b
∗
275 corresponds to the complex conjugate

13
276 g (t) is the wavelet function or mother wavelet.

277 The main property of wavelet transform, which derives from the compact support of its basic

278 function, is to provide a time-scale localization of processes. This is in contrast to the classical

279 trigonometric functions of Fourier analysis. The wavelet transform searches for correlations

280 between the signal and wavelet function. This calculation is done at different scales of a and

281 locally around the time of b. The result is a wavelet coefficient (T(a,b)) contour map known as a

282 scalogram. In order to be classified as a wavelet, a function must have finite energy, and it must

283 satisfy the following "admissibility conditions" (Mallat, 1998):

2
+∞ +∞ gˆ (w)
284 ∫ g (t )dt = 0 , Cg = ∫ dw < ∞ (3)
−∞ −∞ w

285 where,

286 gˆ ( w) is Fourier transform of g(t); i.e., the wavelet must have no zero frequency component.

287 In order to obtain a reconstruction formula for the studied signal, it is necessary to add

288 "regularity conditions" to the previous conditions (Mallat, 1998):

+∞
289 ∫−∞
t k g (t ) dt = 0 Where k= 1,2,…, n-1 (4)

290 So the original signal may be reconstructed using the inverse wavelet transform as (Mallat,

291 1998):

1 +∞ ∞ 1 t −b da.db
292 x(t ) =
cg ∫ ∫
−∞ 0
a
g(
a
)T (a, b) 2
a
(5)

293 For practical applications, the hydrologist does not have at their disposal a continuous-time

294 signal process but rather a discrete-time signal. A discretization of Eq. 2 based on the trapezoidal

295 rule may be the simplest discretization of the continuous wavelet transform, producing N2

14
296 coefficients from a data set of length N. Redundant information is therefore locked up within the

297 coefficients, which may or may not be a desirable property (Addison et al., 2001).

298 To overcome this redundancy, a logarithmically uniform spacing can be used for the a scale

299 discretization with a correspondingly coarser resolution of the b locations, which allows for N

300 transform coefficients to completely describe a signal of length N. Such a discrete wavelet has

301 the form (Mallat, 1998):

m
1 t − nb0 a 0
302 g m ,n (t ) = g( ) (6)
a 0m a 0m

303 Where,

304 a0 is the specified fine dilation, where a0 > 1, with a0 usually equal to 2,

305 b0 is the location parameter, where where b0 > 0, with b0 usually equal to 1, and

306 m and n are integers that control the wavelet dilation and translation respectively;

307 This power of two logarithmic scaling of the translation and dilation is known as the dyadic grid

308 arrangement. The dyadic wavelet can be written in more compact notation as (Mallat, 1998):

−m
309 g m , n (t ) = 2 2 g (2 −m t − n) (7)

310 Discrete dyadic wavelets of this form are commonly chosen to be orthonormal; i.e., (Mallat,

311 1998):

+∞
312 ∫−∞
g m , n (t ) g m′, n′ (t ) dt =δ m , m′δ n ,n′ (8)

313 where,

314 δ is the Kronecker delta.

315 This allows for the complete regeneration of the original signal as an expansion of a linear

316 combination of translates and dilates of orthonormal wavelets.

317 For a discrete time series, xi, the dyadic wavelet transform becomes (Mallat, 1998):

15
 N −1
−m
318 Tm , n = 2 2
∑ g (2 − m i − n) xi (9)
i =0

319 where

320 Tm,n is wavelet coefficient for the discrete wavelet of scale a=2m and location b=2mn.

321 Equation 9 considers a finite time series, xi, where i= 0, 1, 2, …, N-1; and N is an integer power

322 of 2, i.e., N= 2M. This gives the ranges of m and n as, respectively, as 0 <n < 2M-m-1 and

323 1 < m < M. At the largest wavelet scale (i.e., 2m when m=M) only one wavelet is required to

324 cover the time interval, and only one coefficient is produced. At the next scale (2m-1), two

325 wavelets cover the time interval, hence two coefficients are produced, and so on down to m=1.

326 At this point, the a scale is 21, i.e., 2M-1or N/2 coefficients are required to describe the signal at

327 this scale. The total number of wavelet coefficients for a discrete time series of length N=2M is

328 then 1+2+4+8+ …+2M-1 = N-1.

329 In addition to this, a signal smoothed component, T , remain, which is termed the signal mean.

330 Thus, a time series of length N is broken into N components, i.e., with zero redundancy. The

331 inverse discrete transform is given by (Mallat, 1998):

M 2 M − m −1 −m
332 xi = T + ∑ ∑ Tm,n 2 2
g (2 −m i − n) (10)
m =1 n =0

333 or in a simpler format as (Mallat, 1998):

M
334 xi = T (t ) + ∑ Wm (t ) (11)
m =1

335 where,

336 T (t) is the approximation sub-signal at level M, representing the background

337 information of data, and

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338 Wm (t ) are wavelet coefficients which provide the detail sub-signals at levels

339 m = 1, 2, …, M and can capture small features of interpretational value in the data

340 Because of simplicity of W1(t), W2(t), … WM(t), T (t ) , some interesting characteristics, such as

341 period, hidden period, dependence and jump can be diagnosed easily through wavelet

342 components.

343 3. Hydro-climatologic applications of wavelet-AI models

344 It can be stressed that this review is a complement to recent surveys such as Maier et al. (2010)

345 and Abrahart et al. (2012) who just focused on either technical or historical accounting of ANN

346 on the prediction of water resource variables in river systems and river forecasting, respectively.

347 However current review deals with various hydro-climatologic processes instead delving to just

348 one process. Moreover it goes through applications of not only ANN technique but also some

349 other data-driven AI techniques (e.g., SOM, Fuzzy logic, GA, GP, SVM, etc.) coupled with

350 wavelet transform. In this way approximately 105 papers on the subject of wavelet-AI over

351 several hydro-climatologic issues were investigated. Table 3 compares the type of utilized AI

352 techniques, wavelet types, applied hydrological variables and time scales of the reviewed papers.

353 Detailed accounting on various wavelet-AI models over each hydro-climatologic process can be

354 followed in the sub-sections of current section.

355 3.1. Topic 1: Wavelet-AI approach for precipitation modeling

356 Precipitation is needed to replenish water to the earth and is important because it helps maintain

357 the atmospheric balance. The amount and duration of precipitation events affect both water level

358 and water quality. Precipitation can also be damaging, too much rain can cause severe flooding

359 and lots of traffic accidents. Therefore, an accurate estimate of precipitation is essential in water

17
360 resources management, particularly with respect to flood mitigation. However, the wide

361 spatiotemporal variation in rainfall makes its prediction particularly challenging. Numerous

362 numerical, physical and data-driven-based models have been developed to provide an accurate

363 estimation model for precipitation. Mwale and Gan (2005) used wavelet spectra information to

364 identify and analyze the variety in space, time and frequency of dominant oscillations in the

365 rainfall of East Africa, along with the relationships existing between the September-November

366 rainfall in that region and Sea Surface Temperature (SST) of the Indian and South Atlantic

367 Oceans. Their wavelet-based analysis discerned homogeneous zones of rainfall variability over

368 various parts of the Oceans. In order to accurately predict rainfall with a 2-month lead time,

369 linear (i.e., canonical correlation analysis) and nonlinear (i.e., ANN-GA) statistical tele-

370 connection models were applied. A nonlinear ANN-GA model was most accurate in predicting

371 rainfall over most of East Africa, whereas a model based on linear canonical correlation analysis

372 performed poorly over the same region. Mwale et al. (2007) then expanded their models two

373 years later using wavelet empirical orthogonal functions of space-time-Frequency regimes for

374 examining the predictability of southern Africa Summer Rainfall.

375 Partal and Kisi (2007) presented a wavelet-NF method to predict precipitation values. As

376 choosing appropriate model inputs is one of the most critical steps in building an accurate

377 forecasting model, DWT was used to present the original precipitation signal under different

378 resolution intervals, such that daily, monthly, and annual subseries’ characteristics could be more

379 clearly delineated than in the original signal. Subsequently, the correlation coefficients between

380 sub-series and the original precipitation series provided information for the selection of the NF

381 model inputs and for the determination of the effective wavelet components to use in predicting

382 precipitation values in daily scale. Their wavelet-NF model provided a good fit with the

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383 observed data, especially for time series which had zero precipitation in the summer months as

384 well as for the peaks within the testing period. Such a result was quite significant since classical

385 NF models are usually faced difficulties in forecasting extreme values of observed precipitation

386 series. Nourani et al. (2009a) linked wavelet analysis to a non-linear inter-extrapolator ANN for

387 monthly precipitation prediction. A wavelet transform, capable of capturing signals’ multi-scale

388 features, served to decompose the precipitation time series into sub-signals. Using an ANN

389 model with a non-linear kernel to reconstruct the signal better simulated the non-linear behavior

390 of the phenomenon than did other linear models such as seasonal ARIMA. This was largely

391 because the dominant seasonalities extracted via wavelet analysis were assigned greater weights.

392 Furthermore, in investigating the effect of wavelet transform type and optimum decomposition

393 level on model performance, they confirmed the model’s accuracy in foretelling short- (one

394 month ahead) and long-term precipitation events. Similar methodology was also followed by

395 Ramana et al. (2013) to model monthly rainfall values using both rainfall and temperature data

396 as inputs of WANN model.

397 Partal and Cigizoglu (2009) predicted daily precipitation via a wavelet-NN method, which

398 provided a good fit with observed data. In particular, the improvement provided by the new

399 approach in estimating peak values had a noticeable positive effect on performance evaluation

400 criteria. Kisi and Shiri (2011) took the advantage of several AI- based methods in order to model

401 daily precipitation. They compared the abilities of single GEP, NF models, with the linked form

402 of GEP and NF to the wavelet analysis. The results of daily precipitation forecasts via single

403 GEP and NF denoted weak performance, even the imposition of wavelet coefficients as GEP and

404 NF inputs could not satisfactorily improve the forecasting results, although the accuracies

405 increased to a great extent. Finally, they could achieve efficient precipitation forecasting results

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406 by merging the best single and hybrid models’ inputs and introducing them as the models inputs.

407 Among the outcomes of later models, the hybrid wavelet-GEP model indicated more effective

408 performance in forecasting daily precipitation than the wavelet-NF model which was unable to

409 learn the non-linear nature of the process.

410 Kuo et al. (2010a) investigated the seasonal predictability of rainfall via wavelet-AI approach.

411 Wavelet analysis employed on seasonal rainfall and Pacific Ocean SST data, the results revealed

412 strong 2-4-year cycles in rainfall data as well as high wavelet coherence between the selected

413 SST and seasonal rainfall. They went on to use an ANN-GA model to predict seasonal

414 precipitation with a one-season lead time, using the GA to calibrate ANN parameters. As a

415 result, model parameters and coefficients for the different layers were optimized by minimizing

416 an objective function that, in turn, maximized the correlation between simulated and observed

417 seasonal rainfall values. Their study demonstrated a strong relationship between seasonal Pacific

418 SST anomalies and seasonal rainfall at the study site, and this link was well captured by an

419 ANN-GA model.

420 Kisi and Cimen (2012) used a joint wavelet-SVM model for the prediction of daily precipitation

421 and found that the hybrid method could increase the forecasting accuracy of one-day-ahead

422 precipitation better than single SVM and ANN models.

423 Pondering on various researches on precipitation modeling revealed two issues about AI and

424 wavelet, respectively;

425 (i) Since an averaged value of the pointy measured rainfalls by the rain gauges over a

426 watershed is usually assigned to the whole of the watershed, the data and subsequently

427 the model used for forecasting and simulation of the rainfall process usually contain

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428 uncertainties. In such uncertain situations, Fuzzy-based models may be employed in the

429 estimation of uncertainties in real world problems.

430 (ii) It can be deduced that although the data pre-processing process by the wavelet transform

431 can improve the precipitation modeling performance at different time scales, this

432 improvement is more considerable in large scales such as monthly or seasonally than

433 hourly, daily or weekly. Such an outcome is reasonable because the seasonality pattern in

434 large time scales are more highlighted in compared to the small time scales. In other

435 words, the Auto Regressive (AR) or Markovian property of precipitation is more

436 significant in small time scales such as daily scale in which the process does not present a

437 strong Markov chain, whereas the seasonality feature is the dominant factor in large time

438 scales such as monthly or seasonally. In such cases precipitation forecasting in daily scale

439 might not redound to appropriate outcomes. On the other hand, precipitation time series

440 analysis via wavelet not only is considered as a temporal pre-processing technique but

441 also it reveals the effective information about the precipitation background of a specific

442 area. Accordingly, the scalogram of CWT specifies the dominant daily, monthly,

443 seasonally and yearly periods as well as the failure or increase in the precipitation. In this

444 way, droughts and floods can be distinguished clearly. Thus, in using the hybrid wavelet-

445 AI models for the rainfall prediction, more refined time steps can be recognized and used

446 to drive certain hydrologic models in order to predict droughts and floods according the

447 declining and rising trends of rainfall values. Such information should benefit the water

448 resources management of any watershed.

449

450

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451 3.2. Topic 2: Wavelet-AI models in flow forecasting

452 Qualitative and quantitative simulations and predictions of stream-flow is one of the most active

453 research areas in surface water hydrology. Given its potential consequences (flooding, erosion),

454 stream-flow is the generated component of the rainfall-runoff process and needs more precise

455 prediction; therefore, short- and long-term (particularly the latter) forecasting models are

456 extremely important for the optimal management of water resources. Given the influence of such

457 varied phenomena as precipitation, evaporation, temperature, etc. in stream-flow generation, the

458 relevant observed time series tend to be nonlinear, temporally variable and indeterminate. The

459 under-lying mechanisms of stream-flow generation are likely to be quite different during low,

460 medium, and high flow periods, especially when extreme events occur. It is therefore very

461 difficult to make exact prediction of stream-flow (Guo et al., 2011). In several studies the

462 efficiency and accuracy of stream-flow models implementing a wavelet-AI approach has been

463 compared to those of single AI or conventional regression-based models. Typically such models

464 first decompose time series into multiple levels of detail, and then implement a multi-resolution

465 analysis which can effectively diagnose the signal’s main frequency components, as well as

466 abstract local information from the time series. Subsequently, the appropriate sub-series are

467 utilized in the AI model in order to obtain desired results.

468 Cannas et al. (2006) investigated the effects of wavelet-based data pre-processing on NNs’

469 ability to predict the hydrologic behavior of runoff. Employing DWT and CWT to account for

470 non-stationarity and seasonal irregularity of runoff time series, they showed that networks

471 trained with pre-processed data performed better in predicting monthly runoff than did networks

472 trained with non-decomposed, noisy raw signals.

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473 Adamowski (2008a) developed short-term river flood forecasting models based on wavelet and

474 cross-wavelet components and evaluated their accuracy, compared with ANN models and simple

475 perseverance models, in forecasting daily stream-flows with lead times of 1, 3, and 7 days. His

476 models showed great accuracy as a stand-alone forecasting method for 1- and 3-day lead times

477 river flood forecasting, provided no significant trends in the amplitude occurred for the same

478 Julian day year-to-year, and a relatively stable phase shift existed between the flow and

479 meteorological time series. However such river flood forecasting models, based on wavelet and

480 cross-wavelet constituent components, were not accurate for longer lead time forecasting (e.g., 7

481 days).

482 In order to forecast monthly stream-flows Kisi (2008) used a neuro-wavelet model. Comparing

483 his results with those of a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), a MLR and AR models, he found the

484 neuro-wavelet model increased forecast accuracy and outperformed the MLP, MLR and AR

485 models.

486 In a further study, Wang et al. (2009) applied the multi-resolution characteristic of wavelet

487 analysis and the nonlinear capability of ANN to predict inflow of Three Gorges Dam in Yangtze

488 River, China. Using both a wavelet network model and a type of threshold AR model to predict

489 short- and long-term runoffs, they found the wavelet network model to be more accurate, leading

490 them to suggest that future research should focus on functional and feasible wavelet network

491 models.

492 In a thoroughly distinct study, Wu et al. (2009) explored efficiency of various methods in

493 improving the ANN performance in daily flow prediction. The objective of their research was to

494 determine whether data pre-processing techniques such as Moving Average (MA), Singular

495 Spectrum Analysis (SSA), and Wavelet Multi-Resolution Analysis (WMRA), coupled with

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496 ANN, might improve the estimation accuracy of daily flows. These data pre-processing

497 techniques were used to improve and highlight the mapping relationship between inputs and

498 output of the ANN model by smoothing raw flow data. The hybrid models showed noticeable

499 improved performance over the ANN model and considering the performance and complexity of

500 the linkage of ANN to the data pre-processing methods, MA, SSA and WMRA yielded to better

501 efficiency, respectively.

502 Zhou et al. (2008) stated that monthly discharge time series are non-stationary, so it is not

503 suitable to predict such time series using prediction methods designed for stationary time series.

504 They therefore deployed a wavelet predictor-corrector model to decompose the time series into

505 an approximated and several stationary detailed sub-series. Each sub-series was then predicted

506 individually using the ARMA model, and a correction procedure was implemented for the sum

507 of the prediction results. Finally, simulating monthly discharge with ARMA, seasonal ARIMA,

508 and an ANN model, they found the wavelet predictor-corrector model to have greatest prediction

509 accuracy. In addition, the decomposition scale showed no obvious effect on the prediction for the

510 monthly discharge time series.

511 Kisi (2009a) comparing the ability of a joint ANN-wavelet model to an ANN alone in predicting

512 1-day-ahead intermittent stream-flow, tested the models by applying different input

513 combinations of decomposed time series. He ultimately showed that the Wavelet-ANN (WANN)

514 provided significantly better forecasting accuracy than the ANN alone, particularly for high flow

515 estimates.

516 Partal (2009a) evaluated the efficiency of several ANNs (i.e., feed forward back propagation,

517 generalized regression NN, radial based function-based NN) combined with a wavelet transform

518 to predict river flow in future months. Periodic components obtained via wavelet decomposition

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519 were fed to the NNs to improve river flow forecasting. The combination of hybrid wavelet and

520 the feed forward back propagation model outperformed all other models examined in the study.

521 Adamowski and Sun (2010) coupled DWT and ANN for flow forecasting in non-perennial rivers

522 in semi-arid watersheds. The decomposition process of original flow time series into sub-series

523 was iterated, with successive approximation signals being decomposed in turn, so that the

524 original flow time series were broken down into many lower resolution components. The

525 subseries used in the ANN model led to efficient forecasting outcomes. WANN models were

526 found to provide more accurate flow forecasts than the regular ANN models, since wavelet

527 transforms provided useful decompositions of the original time series, and the wavelet-

528 transformed data improved the ability of the ANN forecasting model by capturing useful

529 information on various resolution levels.

530 Using a wavelet-based ANN-GA model, Kuo et al. (2010b) predicted stream-flow with a one

531 season (3-month) lead time- based on SST. Wavelet analysis was first applied to select sectors of

532 SST that were related to the rainfall data of the study sites at seasonal time scale, and then the

533 selected SST was used as predictors in the ANN-GA model to predict seasonal rainfall at one-

534 season lead time. It is noted that the GA portion of the model served to calibrate the parameters

535 of an ANN with a feed forward structure and three layers. Consequences revealed efficient

536 stream-flow prediction methodology.

537 Pramanik et al. (2010) concluded that advance time step stream-flow forecasting was of

538 paramount importance in controlling flood damage, while applying a hybrid wavelet-AI model to

539 stream-flow forecasting. They proposed models which used DWT functions to pre-process the

540 flow time series into wavelet coefficients of different frequency bands, leading to the creations of

541 WANN models with 1-, 2- and 3-day lead times to forecast flow. The hybrid models were

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542 trained using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm and results were compared with simple ANN

543 models. Confirming previous studies’ results, the WANN models provided better prediction of

544 peaks in stream-flow than individual ANN models.

545 In order to develop an accurate and reliable ANN model for hourly flood forecasting, the

546 potential of Wavelet and Bootstrapping techniques linked to ANN (WBANN) was explored by

547 Tiwari and Chatterjee (2010). To capture useful information, the time series was decomposed

548 into different components and then appropriate sub-series were added up to develop new time

549 series. Finally a bootstrap-based ANN model was constructed. Overall, the WBANN model was

550 accurate and reliable in simulating peak water levels, and outperformed the ANN, WANN or

551 BANN models, indicating that while wavelet decomposition improved the performance of ANN

552 models, the bootstrap re-sampling technique produced more consistent and stable solutions.

553 To study short- and long-term stream-flow forecasting, Shiri and Kisi (2010) used recorded

554 stream-flow values to compare the performance of a combined wavelet-NF model, which took

555 into account periodicity of the data, to an unenhanced NF model. The comparison of results

556 showed that adding the periodicity component into the input layer generally increased modelling

557 accuracy, so that, wavelet-NF model could be considered as an appropriate model to simulate

558 daily, monthly and especially yearly stream-flows.

559 Synthetic generation of daily streamflow sequences via wavelet transform as a considerable issue

560 of stochastic hydrology was regarded by Wang et al. (2011b). The method firstly, decomposes

561 the daily streamflow sequences with different frequency component into the series of wavelet

562 coefficients W1(t), W2(t),...,WP(t) and scale coefficients (the residual) CP(t) at a specific

563 resolution of P. Secondly, the series of W1(t), W2(t),...,WP(t) and CP(t) are divided into a

564 number of sub-series based on a yearly period. Thirdly, random sampling is performed from sub-

26
565 series of W1(t), W2(t),...,WP(t) and CP(t), respectively. Finally, based on these sampled sub-

566 series, a large number of synthetic daily streamflow sequences are obtained using wavelet

567 reconstruction algorithm. About the advantages of the developed method, Wang et al. (2011b)

568 indicated some privileges: (1) the approach is a nonparametric; (2) it is able to avoid

569 assumptions of probability distribution types (Normal or Pearson Type III) and of dependence

570 structure (linear or nonlinear); (3) it is not sensitive to the original data length and suitable for

571 any hydrological sequences; and (4) the generated sequences by the method could capture the

572 dependence structure and statistical properties presented in the data. Ultimately, the application

573 of model to a study area demonstrated the effectiveness of the model in generating daily

574 streamflow sequences based on historical data.

575 The ability of a combined model, Wavelet-Generalized Regression NN (WGRNN), was

576 investigated by Kisi (2011a) for prediction of one-month-ahead stream-flow. The WGRNN by

577 combining DWT and GRNN, performed more efficient than the GRNN and feed forward NN

578 models for forecasting monthly stream-flow. Since several features of the original signal, such as

579 its daily, monthly and annual periods, could be discerned more clearly than in the original signal,

580 therefore, estimates were more accurate than those obtained directly by the original signals.

581 Through a similar study, Kisi and Partal (2011) developed a forecasting model for monthly

582 stream-flow via another AI method named NF coupled to DWT. Comparison results indicated

583 that the wavelet-NF model was superior to the classical NF method especially in detecting the

584 peak values of stream-flow.

585 Guo et al. (2011) employed an SVM model improved by the addition of an adaptive insensitive

586 factor to improve the performance of the SVM in predicting monthly stream-flow. Considering

587 the presence of noise in the runoff time series and its potential negative influence on model

27
588 performance, a wavelet de-noising method was applied to reduce or eliminate the noise.

589 Furthermore, given the PSO algorithm’s strong searching ability, an improved PSO was applied

590 to optimize the parameters of the forecasting model. The improved SVM model combined with

591 wavelet analysis was able to process a complex hydrological data series (e.g., monthly stream-

592 flow) better than ANN and conventional SVM models.

593 In a similar and concurrent study, Kisi and Cimen (2011) investigated the accuracy of a

594 combined wavelet and SVM model in forecasting monthly stream-flow. They implemented their

595 study in 5 steps: (i) wavelet de-noising, (ii) determination of best delay time and embedding

596 dimension, (iii) phase-space reconstruction, (iv) model fitting, (v) stream-flow forecasting with

597 different models. With an ANN model serving as the basis of comparison for conventional and

598 improved SVM models, they found that coupling with a DWT significantly increased the

599 accuracy of the Support Vector Regression (SVR) model in forecasting monthly stream-flow.

600 With the goal of forecasting daily discharge, Tiwari and Chatterjee (2011) explored a WBANN

601 model, comparing its performance to that of a traditional ANN, WANN and bootstrap-based

602 ANN. The WBANN and WANN models produced significantly better results than the traditional

603 ANN and bootstrap-based ANN models, particularly in terms of peak discharge forecasting.

604 Similarly, Krishna et al. (2011) employed a hybrid WANN model to forecast daily river flow,

605 achieving good forecasting accuracy, especially with respect to peak points.

606 Ren et al. (2011) took the advantage of localized characteristics of wavelet transform and

607 approximation function of an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) in order to

608 establish a combined wavelet-ANFIS (WANFIS) model for monthly runoff prediction. Issues

609 arising from the large amplitude of intra- and inter-annual variation in monthly runoff were

610 avoided through the use of a wavelet analysis-based resolving and reconstruction technique

28
611 allowing the decomposition of signals with different frequencies. Based on a comparison of

612 measured and simulated values this modeling approach produced acceptable predictions.

613 Tiwari et al. (2012) investigated AI-based (i.e., NN and SOM) and wavelet-based daily river

614 discharge forecasting models. SOM was used to homogeneously classify the data sets, while the

615 NN models served for prediction. The NN models were supplemented by a wavelet approach,

616 which served to enhance forecasting performance with respect to the acquisition of long datasets.

617 The SOM’s effectiveness in clustering data into different groups and the superiority in

618 forecasting river flow of WBANN models over simple NN models were noted.

619 In a recent study, Kalteh (2013) forecasted the monthly river flow by calling upon the

620 capabilities of AI-based (i.e., SVR and ANN) models coupled with wavelet transform. Coupled

621 with a wavelet transform process, ANN and SVR models provided more accurate forecasts than

622 non-coupled ANN or SVR models. The performance of the hybrid wavelet-SVR model exhibited

623 greater reliability than the WANN model.

624 In order to accurately simulate and predict the dynamic behavior of river discharge over a wide

625 range of time intervals, Wei et al. (2012) proposed a hybrid WANN method capable of reliably

626 capturing the high-frequency characteristics of river discharge on a monthly time scale. As a

627 basis for comparison, routine use of the WANN model (i.e., decomposition of time series via

628 wavelet and then input of sub-series into ANN) was used to predict river discharge 48 months in

629 advance. The WANN model decomposed by db5 mother wavelet at level 4 resulted in the most

630 accurate river discharge predictions.

631 To forecast daily inflow with lead times of 1-5 days, Maheswaran and Khosa (2013a) established

632 a multi-scale non-linear model based on coupling a DWT and a second-order Volterra (WVC)

633 model, and compared its performance to that of conventional ANN and WANN models, as well

29
634 as other baseline models. The WVC performed well in short-term flow forecasting, especially

635 when compared with the WANN model. This may be attributed to the ability of the former

636 approach to provide a better scale-specific description of the original time series. It is noted that

637 Maheswaran and Khosa (2012b) extended 1-month ahead streamflow forecasting method using

638 wavelet based multi-scale nonlinear model linked to the second order nonlinear Volterra kernel

639 estimated by Kalman filter formulation. The proposed model was compared with wavelet based

640 linear regression models and other nonlinear approaches such as WANN based models.

641 Adamowski and Prokoph (2013) used the multi-scale resolution features of CWT analysis and

642 cross wavelet analysis to determine the amplitude and timing of stream-flow discontinuities for

643 specific wavebands. The cross wavelet-based method was able to detect the strength and timing

644 of abrupt shifts to new stream-flow levels, gaps in data records longer than the waveband of

645 interest, as well as a sinusoidal discontinuity curve following an underlying modeled annual

646 signal at ±0.5 year uncertainty. Parameter testing of the time-frequency resolution demonstrated

647 that high temporal resolution using narrow analysis windows was favorable to high-frequency

648 resolution for detection of waveband-related discontinuities. Discontinuity analysis on observed

649 daily stream-flow records showed that there was at least one discontinuity-year related to the

650 annual spring flood in each record studied, and that neighboring stream-flows had similar

651 discontinuity patterns.

652 Since reliability reduction of forecasting toward increasing the lead-time is one of the

653 problematic issues in hydrological modeling, Badrzadeh et al. (2013) investigated WANN and

654 WANFIS models provided originally by Nourani et al. (2011), for river flow forecasting.

655 Outcomes indicated that the hybrid WANN model produced better results, especially for the

656 peak values and longer lead-times.

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657 Krishna (2013) went through the capability of two pre-processing techniques of wavelets and

658 MA in combination with ANN and MLR models for prediction of the daily inflow values. The

659 study demonstrated the superiority of wavelet pre-processing technique and owing to the model

660 performance and the complexity of modeling, the wavelet-MLR was optimal than WANN

661 model.

662 Owing to the importance of accurate streamflow prediction in both water quantity and quality

663 management issues, Danandeh Mehr et al. (2013a) applied WANN and linear GP techniques to

664 forecast monthly streamflow values. In contrast to the results of majority of previous researches,

665 in this study, WANN model performed poorly in comparison to linear GP. An explicit linear GP

666 model constructed by only basic arithmetic functions including one month-lagged records of

667 both target and upstream stations revealed the best prediction model for the study catchment. In

668 another similar study, Danandeh Mehr et al. (2013b) went over the prediction of monthly

669 streamflow at successive-station using WANN model.

670 The comprehensive study of Sang (2013b) led to present an improved wavelet modeling

671 framework in conjunction to AI-based black box models for precipitation and discharge time

672 series forecasting. He indicated that the results of wavelet-AI hybrid models generally are

673 impacted by wavelet decomposition of time series. Therefore, he developed the method for DWT

674 decomposition of time series as Wavelet Modeling Framework (WMF). In this light, he firstly

675 separated different deterministic components and removed noise involved in the original time

676 series using DWT to obtain deterministic forecasting results; then, forecasted the former and

677 quantitatively described noise’s random characters to estimate uncertainty; at last, summed them

678 up to attain the final forecasting result. He applied the WMF to four hydrologic cases and

31
679 achieved a clear cut outcome that wavelet-based AI models perform more effective than single

680 AI models.

681 Sahay and Srivastava (2013) developed a wavelet-GA-NN model for forecasting 1-day-ahead

682 monsoon river flows which are difficult to be modeled due to the irregularly spaced spiky large

683 events and sustained flows of varying duration. In this regard, GA was used for optimizing the

684 initial parameters of an ANN training scheme. The results indicated that wavelet-GA-NN model

685 could outperform the AR and GA-optimized ANN models, which used original streamflow time

686 series as inputs.

687 Although majority of wavelet-AI-based models in streamflow forecasting were imparted a

688 particular set of wavelet decomposition sub series as the ‘optimal’ wavelet transform to be

689 used for forecasting purposes, relying on a specific wavelet sub-series often leads to predictions

690 that capture some phenomena at the expenses of others. However, different sub-series play

691 different roles in capturing the different characteristics of a particular hydrological process.

692 Therefore, ensemble approaches based on the use of multiple different wavelets, in conjunction

693 with a multi-model setup, could potentially improve the modeling performance and also allow

694 for uncertainty estimation. This was a novel idea in wavelet-AI field developed by Maheswaran

695 et al. (2013) to propose a new multi-wavelet based ensemble method for the wavelet Volterra

696 coupled model. The ensemble-based multi-wavelet Volterra approach was applied for

697 forecasting streamflow at different scales (daily, weekly and monthly) and the outcomes revealed

698 the superiority of the new approach in comparison to non- ensemble wavelet Volterra models.

699
700 Deliberation on various papers that have been reviewed in this sub-section revealed following

701 points:

32
702 (i) Single AI-based models with short-term memory usually could handle AR property of

703 the process; thus, in modeling procedure each value of series can only be related to the

704 prior values, and subsequently, the peak and maximum values of flow which are

705 important in water resources management and particularly in flood mitigation are

706 underestimated. Providing application of wavelet beside the AI methods can handle long

707 term seasonality as well and reveal proper outcomes for peak flows. It is noted that

708 classic models such as seasonal ARIMA can also handle the long term seasonality, but

709 the superiority of wavelet-AI model is the simultaneous consideration of several short-

710 and long-term seasonalities in modeling process, which may lead to better estimation of

711 peak points.

712 (ii) Hydrologic time series in general and flow time series in particular consist of

713 measurement and/or dynamical noise. In this regard, wavelet transform is capable of de-

714 noising the time series to improve the AI-based modeling performance, in addition to

715 extracting dynamic and multi-scale features of the non-stationary time series.

716 (iii) According to Table 3, among the reviewed papers, the DWT has been applied more than

717 CWT for flow forecasting. It can be related to the nature of flow which is less stochastic,

718 so, the Markovian property of flow time series is more perceptible in comparison to

719 rainfall. In this way, application of DWT in specific levels which refer to daily, weekly,

720 monthly, and yearly seasinalities seems to be more profitable than application of CWT

721 which exhibited much more redundant seasinalities.

722 (iv) One of the important concerns in flow forecasting review is the selection of proper lead

723 time. In daily time scale it is considered that longer lead times (e.g., 7 days) for flow

33
724 forecasting could not lead to accurate forecasting results, while 1-, 2- or 3-day ahead

725 forecasting might be more effective.

726 3.3. Topic 3: Wavelet-AI for rainfall-runoff modeling

727 For any watershed, accurate rainfall-runoff modeling is a key issue in water resource planning, as

728 it provides vital information for flood mitigation, the design of hydraulic structures and overall

729 watershed management. The highly complex, dynamic and non-linear nature of the process on

730 both spatial and temporal scales have led to the scientific investigation of hybrid models, so as to

731 address important but secondary issues. As a result, the potential of wavelet-AI in rainfall-runoff

732 modeling is the focus of the present sub-section.

733 In a preliminary study, Anctil and Tape (2004) explored the use of an ANN rainfall-runoff model

734 combined with wavelet decomposition in an effort to forecast next-day stream-flow, based on

735 stream-flow, rainfall, and potential evapotranspiration time series. Three wavelet decomposed

736 components (i.e., short, intermediate, and long wavelet periods) were used to depict the rainfall-

737 runoff process. An ANN was then trained for each wavelet sub-series. Short wavelet periods

738 were found to be ultimately responsible for most WANN hybrid forecasting error. The slight

739 advantage in performance of the WANN system over non wavelet-assisted models might be

740 attributed to a better usage of the evapotranspiration time series.

741 Later, Remesan et al. (2009) described a new hybrid model based on the Gamma Test, ANN and

742 DWT, evaluated for daily rainfall-runoff modeling. They identified input combinations

743 composed of antecedent rainfall and runoff values using Gamma Test analysis. The proposed

744 hybrid model outperformed other popular AI models (i.e., local LR, NNAR with exogenous

745 input and ANFIS models), as well as the basic benchmark models (i.e., basic benchmark models

746 such as a naive model in which the predicted runoff value is equal to the latest measured value)

34
747 and a trend model (in which the predicted runoff value is based on a linear extrapolation of the

748 two previous runoff values). They indicated that it was quite impressive to observe the

749 significant modeling improvement by purposely decomposing input signals into different

750 frequency bands to be modeled separately, although it has been known for decades that

751 hydrological catchments can act as low-pass filters in converting high frequency rainfall signals

752 into low frequency river flows. The wider implication of their study in the field of hydrological

753 modeling was that its general framework could be applied to other model combinations in which

754 the model engine could consist of other AI techniques, such as SVM, NF systems, or even a

755 conceptual model.

756 Mwale and Gan (2010) integrated wavelet empirical orthogonal function analysis, GA driven

757 ANN, statistical disaggregation and hydrologic modeling into a hydrologic framework to model

758 weekly rainfall-runoff process. They found that the statistical properties of hydro-climatic

759 process at their case study are approximately stationary, and so statistically generated rainfall

760 values may be used to predict the basin runoff with considerable skill.

761 In developing a WANN model to simulate flooding on an arid flood plain, Wang et al. (2011a)

762 implemented a GA in order to gain the ability to achieve a global optimum and avoid a local

763 optimum. This hybrid GA-WANN model showed a strong capacity for rainfall-runoff mapping

764 and computational efficiency as well as being suitable for flood simulation in arid areas.

765 Nourani et al. (2009b) coupled wavelet and ANN to model rainfall-runoff process. Given the

766 extraction via wavelet of the time series’ multi-scale characteristics, the model was capable of

767 predicting both short and long term runoffs. In a further study, Nourani et al. (2011) investigated

768 the rainfall-runoff process using two hybrid wavelet-AI models (i.e., WANN and WANFIS) and

769 found that considering seasonality effects extracted through wavelet decomposition, the hybrid

35
770 WANFIS model outperformed individual AI-based models. They attributed this to the potency of

771 wavelet analysis in extracting dominant frequencies, and fuzzy analysis in handling the

772 uncertainties involved in the relevant phenomena.

773 Given the complexity of rainfall-runoff relationships in mountainous watersheds and the lack of

774 hydrological data in such watersheds, process-based models have a limited applicability for

775 runoff forecasting. In light of this, Adamowski et al. (2011) proposed a methodology where

776 extensive data sets were not required for runoff forecasting in mountainous watersheds;

777 Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS), WANN, and regular ANN models were

778 developed and compared for runoff forecasting applications in the mountainous watershed with

779 limited data. The best WANN and MARS models were found to be comparable in terms of

780 forecasting accuracy, both providing very accurate runoff forecasts compared to the best ANN

781 model, particularly in case of short-term runoff. Runoff forecasting in mountainous regions with

782 processed-based models is often difficult and inaccurate due to the complexity of the rainfall-

783 runoff relationships and difficulties involved in obtaining the required data. On this basis,

784 Adamowski and Prasher (2012) argued that machine learning models offer an alternative for

785 runoff forecasting in such regions. They employed SVR and WANN for daily runoff forecasting

786 in a mountainous region supported by antecedent precipitation index, rainfall, and day of the year

787 data. Both methods provided accurate results, with the best WANN model slightly outperforming

788 the best SVR model in terms of accuracy, leading them to suggest that to further assess the

789 suitability in forecasting runoff these methods should be tested in other mountainous watersheds

790 where only limited data are available.

791 Nourani et al. (2012) investigated the linkage of wavelet analysis to GP in constructing a hybrid

792 model to detect seasonality patterns in rainfall-runoff. The hybrid model indicated its suitability

36
793 for use in forecasting runoff. Nourani et al. (2013a) went on to confirm the superiority of a

794 SOM-ANN model coupled with wavelet transform in rainfall-runoff modeling using satellite

795 data. A two-level SOM clustering technique served to identify spatially homogeneous clusters of

796 satellite precipitation data, and the most operative and effective data were selected for the ANN

797 to model rainfall-runoff process on daily and multi-step scales. Besides removing noise, the

798 wavelet transform served to extract dynamic and multi-scale features from the non-stationary

799 runoff time series. Spatiotemporal pre-processing of ANN model inputs led to a promising

800 improvement in the performance of rainfall-runoff forecasting compared to ad hoc ANN and

801 simple WANN models. The forecasting outcomes indicated that the ANN forecasting model

802 coupled with the SOM clustering method decreased the dimensionality of the input variables and

803 consequently the complexity of the ANN model. On the other hand, by removing noise and

804 revealing the dominant periods, wavelet transformation of runoff data increased the forecasting

805 performance of the model, particularly with respect to peak runoff values. Using a wavelet

806 transform to capture multi-scale features of the rainfall-runoff process, a SOM to classify the

807 extracted features and select the dominants, and an ANN to predict runoff discharge, Nourani

808 and Parhizkar (2013) applied the resultant wavelet-SOM-ANN model for modeling rainfall-

809 runoff process. The two-stage procedure (i.e., data pre-processing and model building stages)

810 was implemented in the rainfall-runoff forecasting model. Since one of the essential steps in any

811 ANN-based model is determination of dominant input variables, independent rainfall and runoff

812 sub-series obtained via wavelet analysis were evaluated and classified with SOM, a strong non-

813 linear classifier. The newly developed model led to better predictions, especially in terms of

814 coefficients of determination for peak points.

37
815 Nayak et al. (2013) demonstrated the potential use of WANN for daily river flow forecasting by

816 developing a rainfall-runoff model and compared the promising results of WANN with single

817 ANN and the NAM (i.e., NAM describes the behavior of each individual component in the

818 hydrological cycle, at catchment level, using a group of interconnected conceptual elements)

819 model consequences. The Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient showed that the WANN model

820 performed better compared to the ANN and also NAM model which enjoys physical elements

821 such as moisture content in estimating the hydrograph characteristics such as flow duration

822 curve.

823 The common method of wavelet-AI approach to be pronounced as an effective black box model

824 in hydro-climatologic modeling generally is the investigation of the relationship between the

825 DWT of the entire time series and application of dominant sub- series as the inputs of AI-based

826 models. In contrast, Kamruzzaman et al. (2013) considered a novel aspect, which exploits the

827 relationship between stream flow on day t and a DWT of the rainfall from day t back as far as

828 day t-k. Then a multi-scale transform was also included to the modeling framework as moving

829 DWT. Although the authors indicated that their aim was to find relatively few wavelet

830 coefficients based on rainfall back as far as day t-k that could be used as linear predictors for

831 stream flow on day t, the application of moving method to the decomposed wavelet time series

832 seems not to be sound good, since each value of wavelet coefficient time series denotes to a

833 specific occult period of process.

834 The review of papers in this sub-section showed that:

835 (i) Majority of researchers applied daily time scale in order to model rainfall-runoff process.

836 Rainfall-runoff models are extensively used to support flood that is why it is important to

837 investigate rainfall-runoff process in short-term scales such as daily. Since the Markovian

38
838 property of the runoff is more perceptible in comparison to rainfall, the combination of

839 runoff antecedents and rainfall data can appropriately produce rainfall-runoff pattern.

840 (ii) Moreover, comparison of both daily and monthly time scales for rainfall-runoff

841 modeling in a watershed revealed that the determination coefficients for peak values

842 were more precise on a monthly time scale compared to a daily time scale. Since in

843 monthly scale modeling the AR characteristic of the time series is decreased by

844 averaging the time series data over a month, therefore the seasonal pattern is highlighted

845 as the main characteristic of the time series which could be captured by wavelet analysis

846 in term of sub-signals.

847 (iii) Rainfall-runoff model performances for various watersheds with similar climate and

848 markedly distinct topography conditions are different. The properties of the flat sub-

849 basin can be handled with simple AI models such as ANN; however, wild watershed

850 (i.e., more steep and large watershed with elevation variety) can be more accurately

851 modeled via ANFIS. In addition to uncertainties relevant to pointy rainfall measurement

852 and spatiotemporal variation over the study area, wild watersheds involve more

853 uncertain and ambiguous hydrological characteristics. Therefore, models contain of the

854 fuzzy theory concept might lead to more reliable results than other AI models. In this

855 essence, application of wavelet which provides dominant sub-series as inputs of model

856 to have insight into physics of process, can effectively decrease undesirable effects of

857 topographic variety of the study area. From the point of uncertainty view, the WANFIS

858 model seems to perform more effective than other wavelet-AI models in modeling wild

859 watersheds.

39
860 (iv) One of the important issues in rainfall-runoff models is the accurate modeling of peak

861 values in order to design appropriate flood alert and management system. The wavelet-

862 based seasonal models are more efficient than only AR models (i.e., ANN and ANFIS)

863 in monitoring peak values. It is evident that extreme or peak values in the rainfall and

864 runoff time series, which occur in a periodic pattern, can be detected by the seasonal

865 models accurately. When comparing the flat and wild watersheds, the wild watershed

866 shows more quick response for an event of precipitation toward a watershed with mild

867 slope and fairly small area, so, more instantaneous jumps may be appeared in the wild

868 watershed’s time series. WANFIS can model such extreme values more accurately due

869 to being compatible with the uncertainty involved. Thoroughly, by employing fuzzy and

870 wavelet concepts linked to the ANN framework, the uncertainty and seasonality of the

871 phenomena respectively, can be better handled.

872 3.4. Topic 4: Wavelet-AI in sediment modeling

873 In terms of assessing sediment impacts on design and management of water resources projects,

874 the estimation and simulation of Suspended Sediment Load (SSL) at a watershed outlet is vital to

875 water and environmental engineers. Unlike many chemical pollutants, sediment is a vital natural

876 component of water bodies; however, particularly in excessive amounts, they can be of concern,

877 either as a contaminant affecting water quality, or by interfering with the efficient performance

878 of hydraulic structures such as dams. Hybrid wavelet-AI models applied for sediment load

879 forecasting are the concern of this sub-section.

880 Partal and Cigizoglu (2008) estimated the SSL in rivers by a hybrid WANN method. The

881 dominant wavelet components obtained via DWT were summed up and served as input for the

882 ANN model. The WANN model provided a good fit to observed data, particularly in case of

40
883 peak values and cumulative sediment loads. Rajaee (2010) compared NF, wavelet-NF (WNF),

884 MLR, and Sediment Rating Curve (SRC) models in forecasting SSL. In this regard, the observed

885 time series of river flow discharge and SSL were decomposed to sub-series via DWT and the

886 effective sub-series were added together and imposed as input to the NF model for

887 daily SSL prediction. The results illustrated the efficiency of WNF model in good agreement

888 with the observed values, while NF, MLR, and SRC models provided unacceptable predictions.

889 In a similar study, Rajaee et al. (2010) went through the efficiency of WNF model for SSL

890 forecasting in a larger study area with lower discharge and SSL amount in comparison to later

891 study and achieved promising results in such a wild watershed. In this essence, the observed time

892 series of river discharge and SSL were decomposed by db4 wavelet and the forceful wavelet

893 components in prediction were determined according the correlation coefficients and summed to

894 be used in NF model. Results showed that the WNF model performance was better in prediction

895 rather than the NF and SRC models, particularly in extreme value prediction. Moreover, the

896 model could be employed to simulate hysteresis phenomenon, while SRC method was incapable

897 to handle the involved hysteresis.

898 Using a coupled WANN, NF model and a conventional SRC, Mirbagheri et al. (2010) forecasted

899 SSL. Their WNF model satisfactorily predicted sediment loads underestimated by ANN, NF and

900 SRC models alone. Besides being particularly apt at predicting load, the WNF model was

901 successful in reproducing the hysteresis phenomenon. Hysteresis is a secondary relationship

902 between sediment and river discharge values which can be detected in a scatter plot of discharge

903 vs. sediment, where above a certain threshold, increasing the discharge diminishes sediment

904 loads. The WNF model was capable of simulating this hysteresis and while its simulation yielded

905 loads rather unlike those measured the SRC method was unable to model this behavior, and the

41
906 ANN and NF models were only somewhat able to regenerating the hysteresis effect. Overall, the

907 WNF model, which used decomposed data to extract important characteristics embedded in the

908 Suspended Sediment Concentration (SSC) signal, outperformed other models that employed raw

909 data.

910 Applying a WANN technique for modeling daily suspended sediment-discharge relationship,

911 Kisi (2010) showed that the hybrid model could increase estimation accuracy. Considering

912 WANN, MLR, and SRC models for daily SSL modeling, Rajaee et al. (2011) showed that the

913 WANN model outperformed the other models, generated reasonable predictions for extreme

914 sediment loads, acceptably simulated the hysteresis phenomenon, and satisfactorily estimated the

915 cumulative SSL.

916 Employing GEP, NF, and ANN techniques to estimate SSL using daily river discharge and

917 sediment load records, Shiri and Kisi (2012) showed that the GEP model outperformed the NF

918 and ANN models. Combining these models with DWT analysis improved all models

919 performances while the wavelet-GEP model outperformed the wavelet-NF and WANN models.

920 Due to the complexity of the relationship between SSC and river discharge, Liu et al. (2013c)

921 constructed a WANN model to predict next day SSC. Observed river discharge and SSC time

922 series were decomposed into seven subseries via DWT using db4 mother wavelet. Effective

923 subseries were selected by cross-correlation analysis and summed to reconstruct noise-free time

924 series to serve as ANN inputs for SSC prediction purpose. The WANN model was better able to

925 predict the highly nonlinear and non-stationary SSC time series than ANN or SRC models. Noise

926 removal using the WANN approach dramatically improved the fit of the predicted SSC time

927 series to the observations. Additionally, error autocorrelation and the correlation between input

42
928 and error time series in the WANN model showed it to be more robust than either the SRC or

929 ANN models.

930 Nourani et al. (2013b) developed ANN-based stream-flow-sediment model by focusing on

931 wavelet-based global soft thresholding method to de-noise hydrological time series on the daily

932 scale. Since the appropriate selection of decomposition level and mother wavelet type are

933 effective in thresholding results, sensitivity analysis was performed over levels and several

934 Daubechies type mother wavelets (Haar, db2, db3, db4 and db5) to choose the proper variables.

935 De-noised time series were applied to ANN model to forecast flow discharge and sediment

936 values. The consequences indicated that, the wavelet-based de-noising approach, as a pre-

937 processing method, could improve the ANN-based stream-flow-sediment forecasting models; in

938 addition, the wavelet de-noising was significantly depended on the chosen mother wavelet

939 whereas forecasting results varied obviously with the alteration of mother wavelets.

940 According to reviewed papers regard to sediment modeling, one of the important concerns in

941 sediment modeling is hysteresis phenomenon in which the SSL depends not only on the water

942 discharge amount and flow capability, but also on the load availability, which is complexly

943 related to the season or month of occurrence. Thus, application of a solely AR model as various

944 AI methods (e.g., ANN, ANFIS) that relates discharge and SSL to their antecedents would not be

945 enough in the presence of occult factors such as hysteresis. In this regard, application of wavelet

946 transform which considers seasonality of process in order to handle hysteresis would be

947 advantageous.

948 3.5. Topic 5: Wavelet-AI for groundwater modeling

949 In many watersheds, groundwater is often one of the major sources of water supply for

950 domestic, agricultural and industrial users. In many such regions, groundwater has been

43
951 withdrawn at rates far in excess of recharge, leading to harmful environmental side effects such

952 as major water-level declines, drying up of wells, reduction of water in streams and lakes,

953 water-quality degradation, increased pumping costs, land subsidence, and decreased well yields

954 (Adamowski and Chan, 2011). To effectively manage groundwater, the ability to predict

955 Groundwater Level (GWL) fluctuations and quantify environmental threats (e.g.,

956 contamination, salinization) and their potential to expand are key hydrological issues. Thus,

957 much qualitative and quantitative investigations focusing on groundwater issues should be

958 undertaken.

959 Adamowski and Chan (2011) developed one month-ahead GWL forecasting model using a

960 coupled DWT-ANN method. The DWT decomposed each original data series into information

961 bearing component series, which then served as inputs to ANN-based forecasting portion of the

962 model. The DWT allowed most of the ‘noisy’ data to be removed and facilitated the extraction of

963 quasi-periodic and periodic signals from the original time series.

964 Maheswaran and Khosa (2013b) compared the GWL forecasting abilities of three hybrid wavelet

965 models; WVC, WANN, and Wavelet-LR as well as ANN and dynamic AR models. Compared to

966 the wavelet-LR and WANN models, the WVC model performed better in forecasting GWL

967 characterized by nonlinearity and non-stationarity. With an increase in lead time, the wavelet

968 based models performed progressively better than the regular models. Overall, accurate long

969 term GWL forecasting was best provided using the WVC model.

970 Investigating the ability of a joint wavelet and NF technique to perform one-, two- and three-day-

971 ahead groundwater depth forecasting, Kisi and Shiri (2012) found that the joint model

972 outperformed solely NF model, particularly for two- and three-day-ahead forecasts.

44
973 Moosavi et al. (2013a) compared several data-driven models (i.e., ANN, ANFIS, WANN and

974 WANFIS models) for forecasting GWL in monthly scale. Comparison of results demonstrated

975 that WANFIS model outperformed other models since it could handle both uncertainty and

976 seasonality involved in the process, also forecasting on the bases of 1-to 4-months ahead

977 revealed that all modeling approaches are satisfactory only to forecast GWL up to 2 months

978 ahead.

979 Low numbers of gathered papers on groundwater modeling via wavelet-AI demonstrates needs

980 to consider groundwater and relevant issues more meticulously. Meanwhile, it can be inferred

981 that monthly time scale or any long-term scale is the appropriate scale for modeling

982 groundwater, since such scales coincide the process nature, notwithstanding the study of Kisi and

983 Shiri (2012) who performed daily groundwater modeling. Thus, the importance of attention to

984 the nature of hydrologic process and selection of appropriate seasonal features via wavelet are

985 delineated more.

986 Through a comparative study, Moosavi et al. (2013b) investigated the optimum structures of

987 WANN and WANFIS models for GWL forecasting. They delineated contribution percentage of

988 each effective factor on the performance of WANN and WANFIS models by the analysis of

989 variance without tolerating boring repetitions of trial-and-error approach. Their research revealed

990 that transfer functions of ANN and membership function type of ANFIS beside the mother

991 wavelet type are the most important factors in performance of WANN and WANFIS models,

992 respectively. Comparison of optimal WANN and WANFIS showed higher performance of

993 WANFIS.

994 Since groundwater is recharged by flow or any precipitation that seeps into ground, the periodic

995 characteristic of groundwater is drastically relevant to rainfall and runoff processes as well as

45
996 climatic parameters. Therefore, as the concluding remark of current sub-section, it could be

997 suggested that application of wavelet-AI in order to determine the lags, correlation and

998 interaction between the climatic parameters and GWL as well as groundwater quality factors is a

999 promising idea. On the other hand, because the groundwater is susceptible to pollutants which

1000 may follow periodic pattern to soak into underground, wavelet-AI approach can simulate and

1001 extract effective feature and pattern among GWL, climatic parameters and contaminants.

1002 3.6. Topic 6: Other hydro-climatologic applications of wavelet-AI models

1003 Besides the detailed investigations of wavelet-AI model applications to forecast various

1004 hydrological processes, they have been also successfully applied to model other hydro-

1005 climatologic processes (i.e., shallow watertable depths, drought, snowmelt, evapotranspiration,

1006 etc.)

1007 Wang and Ding (2003) proposed hybrid WANN models to predict monthly mean water table

1008 depths and daily discharge. In terms of prediction accuracy, the hybrid model outperformed

1009 ARMA and threshold AR models, trained with the GA optimization technique. The results

1010 implied that when the forecasting horizon was extended the fitting and testing precision of the

1011 hybrid model outstripped that of the other models.

1012 Kim and Valdes (2003) linked dyadic wavelet transforms and NNs to generate a WANN model

1013 capable of forecasting the Palmer drought severity index at various lead times. In order to reduce

1014 the inconsistency of the sub-signal, a wavelet transform based on the dyadic algorithm was used.

1015 They concluded that the hybrid enhanced the ability of NNs to forecast the indexed regional

1016 drought. Moreover, based on several accuracy statistics, the forecasting skill of the hybrid model

1017 for lead times up to 6 months showed a dramatic superiority (4 to 60%) over other statistical

1018 prediction methods. Following the previous study, Belayneh and Adamowski (2013) and

46
1019 Belayneh et al. (2014) investigated the ability of data driven models such as ARIMA, ANN,

1020 SVR to forecast long-term (6 and 12 months lead times) drought. In spite of promising results

1021 that Kim and Valdes (2003) achieved in drought forecasting via WANN model for lead times up

1022 to 6 months, Belayneh et al. (2014) proposed wavelet-SVR model in addition to WANN model

1023 to forecast long term drought. In this regard, they applied Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) 12

1024 and 24 as indicators of long-term drought conditions. Undoubtedly, the forecast results for

1025 WANN and wavelet-SVR models were improved compared to models without any wavelet

1026 based pre-processing, but the significant achievement was that WANN model could perform

1027 more efficient than wavelet-SVR.

1028 Accordingly, while SVR model accurately predicted events of drought, problematic issue was

1029 diagnosed in predicting the inception of drought accompanying a slight time shift error,

1030 thereupon wavelet application in conjunction to SVR model obviated the single SVR problems

1031 but led to overestimate periods of extreme precipitation or drought. Controversially, the ANN

1032 model underestimated some instances where the observed SPI value corresponds to extreme

1033 drought or precipitation. Finally, the performance of WANN model was closely mirror the

1034 observed results and did not underestimate extreme events of precipitation or drought.

1035 This study proved that the approximation time series component in wavelet decomposition is the

1036 most effective component in forecasting SPI time series, which adequately de-noises the data and

1037 avoids any discontinuities within the SPI time series.

1038 The other study which modeled drought as one of natural hazards was conducted by

1039 Shirmohammadi et al. (2013). The research was carried out to evaluate the ability of WANN and

1040 ANFIS techniques for meteorological drought forecasting in one, two, and three time steps (6

1041 months) ahead. Apart from the significant outcomes of majority of papers about potency of

47
1042 wavelet in modeling performance enhancement, ANFIS models provided more accurate

1043 predictions than ANN models. Therefore, the WANFIS was introduced as the efficient model to

1044 forecast drought in comparison to WANN.

1045 Given the importance and advantage of considering soil moisture information in a variety of

1046 hydrologic models, Lauzon et al. (2004) proposed the analysis of soil moisture conditions based

1047 on wavelet analysis and SOM through Kohonen NNs. Through these techniques, the influence of

1048 soil moisture on the hydrologic regime could be assessed and relevant information could be

1049 extracted for the development of stream-flow model. Based on results inferred from wavelet

1050 analysis, soil moisture supported the annual cycle in observed flows. The links between

1051 precipitation events, the short-term behavior of soil moisture and the inflow regime could be

1052 clearly seen through wavelet analysis. A comprehensive description of the soil moisture profile,

1053 its evolution over time, and its relation to precipitation, temperature and flow observations were

1054 performed via wavelet analysis and SOM.

1055 Since the seasonal drought is usually originated from low available soil moisture, Deng et al.

1056 (2011) predicted the dynamic changes of soil water in the field via daily soil water content

1057 simulated by least squares SVM with the meteorological factors. The wavelet-based de-noising

1058 was applied to pre-process the original chaotic soil water signal and the ultimate results of the

1059 prediction showed promising improvement of model in comparison to ANN and ANFIS models.

1060 Adamowski (2008b) proposed a method of stand-alone short-term spring snowmelt river flood

1061 forecasting based on wavelet and cross-wavelet analysis. The accuracy in forecasting daily

1062 stream-flows with lead-times of 1, 2, and 6 days of the new wavelet forecasting method was

1063 compared to that of MLR analysis, ARIMA analysis, and ANN. The wavelet-based forecasting

48
1064 method was shown to accurately forecast river flooding for 1 and 2-day lead-times, but was not

1065 particularly accurate for longer lead-time forecasts (e.g., 6 days).

1066 Accurate prediction of solid waste generation is a crucial issue in the planning and design of

1067 municipal water purification systems. Noori et al. (2009) applied hybrid WANFIS and WANN

1068 models to predict the weekly waste generation from a municipal solid waste management

1069 system. Input data pre-processing though wavelet analysis clearly improved prediction accuracy.

1070 Of the two models tested, the WANFIS model, by reason of its effective handling of

1071 uncertainties involved in the process, exhibited a better performance than the WANN model.

1072 Evapotranspiration is a complex process affected by a variety of climatologic factors. Hybrid

1073 wavelet-NN models provide an alternative way of exploring the underlying mechanisms of

1074 evapotranspiration. In consideration of this, Partal (2009b) tested the ability of a WANN model

1075 in estimating reference evapotranspiration. Applying wavelet analysis to raw data of climatic

1076 data (i.e., air temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, relative humidity) as a pre-processing

1077 approach allowed the ANN model to equal or outperform a MLR and the empirical Hargreaves

1078 method in daily evapotranspiration forecasting. This confirmed that the hybrid WANN method

1079 could be successfully applied to model reference evapotranspiration based on climatic data.

1080 In another study, the use of wavelet analysis in conjunction to AI was employed to predict daily

1081 evaporation (Abghari et al., 2012). Mexican Hat and poly WOG1 mother wavelet activation

1082 functions were imposed to an ANN instead of the commonly used Sigmoid function, and

1083 differences in terms of daily pan evaporation predictions noted. In terms of the accuracy of daily

1084 pan evaporation forecasts, the WANN model outperformed any single ANN model.

49
1085 Applying a hybrid WANN model to the 1- and 6-month-ahead forecasting of mean monthly lake

1086 levels, Kisi (2009b) found that WANN significantly increased the short- and long-term forecast

1087 accuracy over wavelet-free models.

1088 Campisi et al. (2012) tackled the problem of forecasting urban water demand by means of a

1089 back-propagation ANN coupled with a wavelet de-noising technique. The forecasting horizon

1090 was varied from 1 to 6 months and the impact of five different wavelet filter-banks on ANN

1091 outcomes was explored. First level decomposition by means of a wavelet-filter could improve

1092 generalization in ANNs. Moreover, ANNs coupled with Haar and db2 and db3 filter-banks

1093 outperformed non-coupled ANN, MLR and ANN models coupled with db4 and db5 filters.

1094 Overall, they found that the de-noising impact gained via wavelet-attributable reduction in

1095 training set variance could improve forecasting accuracy; however an oversimplification of the

1096 input-matrix could lead to a deterioration in the forecasting accuracy and induce the network

1097 instability.

1098 Short term (1, 3, and 5 days; 1 and 2 weeks; and 1 and 2 months) urban water demand

1099 forecasting was also conducted by Tiwari and Adamowski (2013) via WBANN model. The

1100 results demonstrated that the hybrid WBANN and WANN models produce significantly more

1101 accurate forecasting results than the traditional NN, BNN, ARIMA, and ARIMAX models. It

1102 was also found that the WBANN model reduces the uncertainty associated with the forecasts,

1103 and the performance of WBANN forecasted confidence bands were found to be more accurate

1104 and reliable than BNN forecasted confidence bands.

1105 For coastal and ocean engineering applications, Ozger (2010) employed a combination of

1106 wavelet and fuzzy logic approaches to forecast wave heights and periods with lead times up to 48

1107 hours. A wavelet technique was used to separate time series into spectral bands, which were

50
1108 subsequently estimated individually through a fuzzy logic approach. The hybrid wavelet-fuzzy

1109 logic model outperformed the single fuzzy logic, ANN and ARMA methods. The superiority of

1110 the wavelet-fuzzy logic in terms of model performance was particularly notable for longer lead

1111 times (e.g., 48 hours).

1112 Kisi (2011b) compared the performance of a Wavelet Regression (WR) technique with ANN

1113 models for daily river-stage forecasting. In order to create the forecasting models, two different

1114 WR models were developed using the stage sub-time series. The sum of effective decomposed

1115 details and the approximation components were used as inputs to the WR1 model, while in the

1116 WR2 model, the effective details and the approximation components were used as separate

1117 inputs. Under these circumstances, the WR models outperformed the single ANN models, and

1118 the WR2 model outperformed the WR1 model.

1119 Since daily water demand forecasting is an important component of cost-effective and

1120 sustainable management and optimization of urban water supply systems, Adamowski et al.

1121 (2012) proposed an urban water demand forecasting method based on coupling a DWT and ANN

1122 for a lead time of one day over the summer months (May to August). The key variables used to

1123 develop and validate the models were daily total precipitation, daily maximum temperature, and

1124 daily water demand data. The WANN model was found to provide more accurate urban water

1125 demand forecasts than the MLR, MNLR, ARIMA or ANN models.

1126 Deka and Prahlada (2012) employed a WANN model to forecast the occurrence of waves of

1127 significant height reaching the west coast of India for lead times up to 48 hours. A WANN

1128 drawing on a multi-resolution time series for input data to its ANN component provided more

1129 accurate forecasts than a single ANN.

51
1130 Land cover assessment as a hydro-climatologic related field is considered at various hydrological

1131 studies. In this light, a wavelet feature based supervised scheme for fuzzy classification of land

1132 cover multispectral remote sensing images was proposed by Shankar et al. (2011). In a distinct

1133 application of wavelet, the obtained wavelet features from land cover images provided important

1134 information about the spatial and spectral characteristics of image pixels and hence could be used

1135 in fuzzy based land cover classification. The classification results compared to original spectral

1136 feature based methods demonstrated the high efficiency of wavelet-based fuzzy classification of

1137 land cover.

1138 A wavelet-based NN model was developed by Shekarrizfard et al. (2012) in order to model the

1139 relationship between PM10 (a major air pollutant) levels and meteorological data including

1140 several parameters, such as wind speed, wind direction, moisture, and temperature. Due to the

1141 reduction in the noise inherent to most meteorological data by means of wavelet transform, the

1142 wavelet-enhanced ANN generated noticeable accurate predictions of PM10 levels, compared to a

1143 wavelet-free ANN method. They concluded that the proposed WANN model was generally an

1144 effective method for PM10 level prediction. In a similar parameter prediction, Siwek and Osowski

1145 (2012) used several AI methods (i.e., MLP, radial basis function, Elman network and SVM) as

1146 well as a linear AR model in conjunction with DWT to forecast the daily average concentration

1147 of PM10. Application of wavelet and ensemble of many individual prediction results led to a

1148 distinct and accurate method of prediction.

1149 Karran et al. (2013) conducted an exploration on of how well wavelet-AI models perform at

1150 different climate regimes with differing hydrological characteristics and studied the performance

1151 of such models for lead times of less than one month. Their study compared the use of ANNs,

1152 SVR, WANN, and wavelet-SVR in Mediterranean, Oceanic, and Hemiboreal watersheds. The

52
1153 results indicated that SVR based models overall performed well, but no one model outperformed

1154 the others in more than one watershed, suggesting that some models may be more suitable for

1155 certain types of data. Overall, model performance varied greatly between climate regimes and

1156 they suggested that higher persistence and slower hydrological processes (i.e., snowmelt, glacial

1157 runoff, and subsurface flow) support reliable forecasting in daily and multi-day lead times.

1158 Yu et al. (2013) conducted a research on the ‘‘seeming’’ and ‘‘true’’ long-term forecast of

1159 hydro-meteorological signal. To this end, to predict hydro-meteorological signals various hybrid

1160 and single models were used to evaluate two mechanisms of long-term forecast.

1161 A systematic comparison among the forecasting performances with corresponding driving

1162 mechanisms analysis revealed that; the seeming long-term forecast revealed abnormally higher

1163 and more similar performances among different hybrid and single models, but the true long-term

1164 forecast provided a concept of real long-term prediction with higher reliability and practical

1165 values. This consequence is related to difference patterns of imposing input data to models.

1166 Moreover, the study proved that hybrid WNF model accurately performs in hydro-

1167 meteorological true long-term forecast, and such an improvement was more dominant for

1168 hydrological time series. Through the study, Yu et al. (2013) noted that more improved methods

1169 are required to forecast true long-term hydro-meteorological signals and one of their suggestions

1170 was to use broader horizon of forecasting results instead of one-day-ahead prediction in true

1171 long-term forecasting procedure as the inputs.

1172 Water quality modeling via hybrid wavelet-AI models is one of the less considered hydrologic

1173 issues addressed by Najah et al. (2012). Monthly water quality parameters of a river were

1174 predicted utilizing ANFIS model. Since the observational quality data might be polluted by noise

53
1175 owing to systematic and random errors, wavelet de-noising technique in conjunction with ANFIS

1176 model was applied.

1177 Due to the importance of quality parameters especially parameters affected by the urbanization

1178 surrounding the river, fairly exact predicting consequences could be effective to assist decision-

1179 makers in reporting the status of water quality, as well as investigating spatial and temporal

1180 changes.

1181 Since some hydro-climatologic processes and applications of wavelet-AI models through them

1182 such as air temperature trends, temperature and thermal power consumption forecasting, wind

1183 speed prediction, heat fluxes, and evapotranspiration assessment, environmental parameter

1184 predictions on ecosystems and etc. may also considered as interdisciplinary approaches which

1185 can be involved in hydrology some of such studies are addressed to probe on the more

1186 meticulously (e.g. see, Nalley et al. ,2013 ; Pingale et al. ,2013; Eynard et al. ,2011; Liu et al.

1187 ,2013a,b; Liu et al. ,2014 ; Evrendilek ,2012; Wang et al. ,2013).

1188 As the conclusion of this sub-section it is inferred that alike other hydro-climatologic processes

1189 which were investigated in previous sub-sections, application of hybrid wavelet-AI method could

1190 improve the performance of the hydro-climatologic processes.

1191 Overall, according to several reviewed studies, application of wavelet as a pre-processing

1192 technique, which usually improves the modeling performance as employed mostly via one of

1193 three scenarios, after decomposition of main signal to seasonal sub-series at different scales as:

1194 (i) imposition of all decomposed time series as inputs of the AI model,

1195 (ii) imposition of only dominant sub-series as inputs of the AI model,

1196 (iii) imposition of the original signal as the input of AI model, reconstructed by using only

1197 selected dominant sub-series.

54
1198 Comparison of the reported results by reviewed papers demonstrates that application of second

1199 scenario due to simplicity of the structure and reduction of redundant and non-relevant data as

1200 well as accurate performance may lead to more appropriate results in hydro-climatologic

1201 applications of the wavelet-AI methods, while the application of two other methods is not

1202 discarded totally.

1203 4. Summary and conclusions

1204 Since the emergence of AI techniques in hydro-climatology, research activity in the field of

1205 modeling, analyzing, forecasting and prediction of water quantity and quality variables has

1206 increased dramatically. The wavelet’s coming out and need to a robust technique to scrutiny the

1207 hydrological signals led to concurrent use of wavelet and AI methods separately and linked. The

1208 average number of journal papers published on wavelet-AI applications was increased from 1 per

1209 year for period of years 2000 to 2005, to 6.4 papers per year for the next five years (i.e., 2005-

1210 2010) and 22 papers per year for the recent 3 years (i.e., 2010-2013). This is despite the fact that

1211 a limited journal list based on Scopus database search was considered for this evaluation. Thus, it

1212 can easily inferred that over the last decades, wavelet-AI applications have increased in modeling

1213 various hydrological processes such as rainfall-runoff, stream-flow, precipitation, sediment,

1214 groundwater and others. Among the processes involved in hydrologic cycle broad researches

1215 have been conducted on stream-flow modeling, in return very few papers have focused on other

1216 processes of hydrologic cycle and even fewer have considered in water quality and water

1217 resources management issues.

1218 Given, on the one hand, the capacity and robustness of AI models in coping with the non-linear

1219 and dynamic nature of hydrologic processes, and on the other hand the ability of wavelet analysis

1220 to extract the prominent periodicities and seasonalities from a time series, a greater

55
1221 understanding and ability to predict various hydrological processes can be achieved. The results

1222 of several studies revealed the relative efficiency of wavelet-AI models over other methods in

1223 accurately forecasting hydrological parameters. These improvements in hydrological forecasting

1224 may lead to a better interpretation of phenomena and inform the development of appropriate

1225 water and environmental resource planning and management policies.

1226 In the current review paper several papers were investigated and compared that used wavelet-AI

1227 based models with great operation or forecasting ability in order to model several hydro-climate

1228 processes. One of the most important issues was probing that which AI method can best fit the

1229 specific hydro-climate process. It seems that inattention to this issue led to application of various

1230 AI models without any consideration to appropriateness of model. As an example (See Table 3)

1231 among 34 papers modeled the flow 25 of them solely used ANN as the appropriate AI method.

1232 The other 9 papers preferred GP, SVM, SVR and ANFIS as other sorts of AI method. In this

1233 regard according to the investigation of authors, it seems that in issues with high uncertainty

1234 involved in phenomena ANFIS can lead to more appropriate results. Rainfall-runoff modeling in

1235 a very large watershed with so sparse sampling gauges or sediment amount prediction in various

1236 watersheds with different beds can be as examples of exposing high uncertainty into modeling.

1237 On the other hand, the wavelet-based seasonal models are more efficient than the AR models

1238 (i.e., ANN and ANFIS) in monitoring peak values. It is evident that extreme or peak values in

1239 the rainfall, runoff or sediment time series, which occur in periodic patterns, can be detected by

1240 the seasonal models more accurately. For short term real forecasting or for modeling in fine time

1241 resolution (e.g., hourly, daily), a pour AR model or WANN model with low decomposition level

1242 which uses current and only a few previous state’s values of process as inputs. But for long term,

1243 seasonal forecasting or modeling in monthly or seasonal time scales, a hybrid wavelet-AI model

56
1244 which decomposes time series at high level can detect long term memory of the process.

1245 Furthermore, the study parameter has significant role in selecting the reliable modeling tool. For

1246 example, for modeling a highly stochastic process (e.g., event-based precipitation) a

1247 probabilistic-based pre-processing (e.g., bootstrapping-based simulation) could also be helpful.

1248 In former study, Maier and Dandy (2000) identified the adoption of appropriate input

1249 determination approaches, as one of the main concerns in hydro-climatologic models. Moreover,

1250 Maier et al. (2010) in a recent review on ANN developing methods indicated two deficiencies of

1251 ANN-based hydrologic modeling; firstly, evaluating the relationship between input variables

1252 with the model output, secondly, investigating input independence and avoiding redundant inputs

1253 despite of being helpful in well performance of ANN model, might increase model complexity

1254 and parameter uncertainty. If these two issues are addressed in other AI-based models in addition

1255 to ANN, increased attention should be devoted to reduce the uncertainty surrounding model

1256 outputs and to enable AI-based model to extract more confident knowledge from the data. In this

1257 way, wavelet-based pre-processing method as well as various AI-based optimization techniques

1258 are capable of obviating the aforementioned two issues by;

1259 (i) Wavelet transform breaks down the signal into periods involved in the process, then via

1260 an AI-based optimization technique (e.g., GA) the potential sub-signals having

1261 significant relationship with the model output can be found out. Thus, implication of

1262 wavelet-AI approach not only tackles to adopt non-linear model input selection, but also

1263 provides pre-processing on each input signal via the wavelet analysis.

1264 (ii) Application of wavelet transform leads to identification of various periods as sub-signals,

1265 subsequently, the selection of dominant sub-signals (as inputs of AI models) having an

57
1266 insight into model scale or entity, prevents the interference of redundant information and

1267 reduces the uncertainty surrounding AI-based model output.

1268 The future of predicting of hydrological processes through wavelet-AI systems can be

1269 anticipated if one looks at how the field evolved over the past decade. Firstly, in almost all

1270 hydrologic signals, the underlying complex non-linear seasonalities and relationships have been

1271 extracted through the implementation of wavelet transform. Secondly, according to task at hand

1272 (e.g., forecasting, optimization, or classification), one or another AI-based technique can be

1273 applied in order to fulfill the purpose of modeling. In general, it can be concluded that recently

1274 implemented wavelet-based models have principally focused on improving the accuracy of

1275 hydrologic processes modeling. Evidently, through the application of a hybrid wavelet-AI model

1276 to improve the modeling performance, the classic concerns of data-driven modeling (i.e., well

1277 established data division to have the requisite training and validation subsets, optimal network

1278 structure of the AI technique, etc.) should be regarded to acquire a precise hybrid model.

1279 According to Table 3, the dominant field of application of hybrid wavelet-AI models in

1280 hydrological studies is forecasting and prediction. Stream-flow forecasting via wavelet-AI

1281 models has been the focus of several studies, whereas their use in predicting water quality

1282 parameters has attracted less attention. There is therefore a need to broaden the range of

1283 application of wavelet-AI models to focus on other predictive variables, especially those

1284 concerned with water quality. However, one factor limiting the application of wavelet-AI models

1285 in water quality modeling might be the lack of good quality, long-term data to detect the long-

1286 term seasonality signature of the process.

1287 Among the reviewed papers, only about 20% of studies used CWT for decomposing

1288 hydrological time series and the majority of studies utilized DWT. This is because the real world

58
1289 observed hydrologic time series are measured and gathered in discrete form rather in the

1290 continuous format. So, the dyadic DWT is more suitable for decomposition of time series to

1291 trend and details sub-signals comprising high frequencies and fast events, and also to reconstruct

1292 the original time series from sub-signals. Each resolution level in DWT represents a dyadic

1293 period based on the scale of data. Considering a set of daily data, DWT decomposition leads to

1294 2n-day mode resolutions (e.g., 21 -day mode, 22-day mode, 23 -day mode which is nearly weekly

1295 mode, 24-day mode, 25-day mode which is nearly monthly mode, and …, 26-day mode which is

1296 nearly yearly mode, etc.) which approximately denote the periodicity of a hydrologic process.

1297 Although 2ଷ -day mode and 2ହ -day mode fairly accurate state the weekly and monthly periods,

1298 28-day mode represents yearly periodicity with 30% error. Therefore it is doubted that DWT can

1299 represent yearly periodicity as well as CWT which is able to depict the exact periods. On the

1300 other hand, despite CWT provides a time-frequency representation of a signal at many different

1301 and exact periods in the time domain, it suffers the redundant information locked up within the

1302 coefficients, which may or may not be a desirable property. Thus, it is inferred that according to

1303 considered hydrologic time series and its scale the DWT or CWT should be selected and applied.

1304 In the majority of reviewed papers, Nash-Sutcliff evaluation criterion (Nash and Sutcliff 1970)

1305 has been applied beside other efficiency criteria (e.g., Mean Absolute Error; MAE, Root Mean

1306 Square Error; RMSE) to evaluate the model performance. According to Legates and McCabe

1307 (1999) a perfect evaluation of model performance should include at least one ‘goodness-of-fit’ or

1308 relative error measure (e.g., Nash-Sutcliff criterion) and at least one absolute error measure (e.g.,

1309 RMSE or MAE), thus, a hydrological model can be sufficiently evaluated by Nash-Sutcliff and

1310 RMSE but due to the importance of peak and extreme values in hydrologic processes other

1311 criteria (e.g., Ratio of Absolute Error of Peak value) may also be applied. For design of disaster

59
1312 alert system (e.g., flood alert system), in addition to measure of peak value error (error between

1313 observed and computed peak values), the occurrence time of such extreme conditions should also

1314 be regarded. In this regard, Dawson et al. (2007) developed a scope to evaluate metrics for the

1315 standardized assessment of hydrological forecasts.

1316 In spite of black box nature of AI methods, the link of wavelet analysis to them makes it possible

1317 to have insight into the physic of the process in both time and space points of view. For example,

1318 due to the urbanization and land use/cover changes , the watershed’s lag time and response to the

1319 inputs (e.g., rainfall) may be changed which in turn, the calibrated parameters of the employed

1320 wavelet-AI model (e.g., decomposition level, mother wavelet, input lags…) are changed. To

1321 monitor such changes, the time series of study process should be split into some sub-series and

1322 by comparing the calibrated parameters of model by sub-series, the trend in land cover/use can

1323 be detected. Similar methodology can be used to detect spatial changes of land uses by dividing

1324 the watershed into some sub-basins.

1325 5. Recommendations for future researches

1326 Based on the review of almost 105 papers about the applications of wavelet-AI methods in

1327 hydro-climatology fields conducted in this paper, the following recommendations for future

1328 works could be considered:

1329 1. Given the discrete nature of hydrologic time series, the present application of wavelet

1330 transform in hydrology mainly concentrates on the use of DWT. A broader use of CWT

1331 is suggested in order to exploit its properties over all time scales, such as with dyadic

1332 scales in DWT.

1333 2. Considering the importance of wavelet transform on temporal pre-processing, it is clearly

1334 an indispensable tool in extracting the underlying features and de-noising time series.

60
1335 While such applications have been exploited in hydrological modeling in recent years, it

1336 might be a novel idea to utilize wavelet transform for pre-processing of spatial data (e.g.,

1337 digital elevation model) employed in the hydrological modeling.

1338 3. The main concerns regarding wavelet-based models are the appropriate selection of

1339 mother wavelet and decomposition level according to considered hydrological process

1340 entity and the scale of the process. While Nourani et al. (2011, 2013a) stated that

1341 similarity in shape between the mother wavelet and that of the time series under study is

1342 the best guideline in choosing the proper mother wavelet; it might be a novel idea to

1343 investigate similarities from another point of view than form (e.g., energy). Although the

1344 selection of mother wavelet and decomposition level have been studied (Nourani et al.,

1345 2011; Sang, 2012), a deeper investigation could lead to the selection of a specific mother

1346 wavelet according to the nature of the hydrologic process investigated, and the use of an

1347 algorithm based on historical data length to select the decomposition level.

1348 4. Due to a few number of papers conducted on the field of groundwater and water quality

1349 modeling via wavelet-AI models, more work needs to be undertaken in these issues.

1350 5. Beside the suggestion of Abrahart et al. (2012) in order to have benchmark data set, it

1351 would be a promising idea to develop an archive of appropriate wavelet-AI models

1352 regard to specific hydro-climatologic process, in which there is transparency in the

1353 application of different types of wavelet transform (i.e., DWT, CWT), efficient mother

1354 wavelet type and finally adequate AI techniques to each hydro-climatologic process in a

1355 desired time scale.

1356 6. In addition to the ability of wavelet-AI models for black box modeling of hydrological

1357 processes, they can also be linked to physically-based models (e.g., TOPMODEL; Beven

61
1358 and Kirkby,1979) to develop integrated modular models. For this purpose, the

1359 geomorphologic characteristics of study area at sub-grid scale can be extracted and

1360 represented via geographic information system tools, pre-processed by wavelet and then

1361 imposed into the model to estimate spatiotemporal variability of parameters (e.g., soil

1362 moisture, GWL, recharge, transmissivity). In this way, other AI methods such as SOM-

1363 based spatial clustering of grids into homogeneous zones may also be employed.

1364 7. It is also suggested to perform and present other review papers to survey hydro-

1365 climatologic applications of different hybrid models constructed by conjunction of AI

1366 models with other commonly used data pre/post processing techniques.

1367

1368

1369

1370

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1372

1373

1374

1375

1376

1377

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1379

1380

62
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1928

1929 Figures captions

1930 Fig 1. Schematic diagram of hybrid wavelet-AI forecasting model.

1931 Fig 2. Number of published papers about wavelet-AI applications in hydro-climatology (indexed

1932 in Scopus) with respect to year of publication.

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942

1943

1944

1945

87
1946

1947

1948

88
1949

35

30

25
NUMBER OF PAPERS

20

15

10

0
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

YEAR OF PUBLICATION
1950

1951

1952 Fig 2. Number of published papers about wavelet-AI applications in hydro-climatology (indexed

1953 in Scopus) with respect to year of publication.

1954

1955

89
1956

Table 1. Examples of some AI applications in hydrological processes modeling.

Hydrologic process ANN Fuzzy GP GA SVM

Stream-flow modeling Sudheer et al., 2008 Chang and Chen, Ni et al., 2010 Parasuraman and Li et al., 2010
2001 Elshorbagy, 2007
Rainfall-runoff modeling Hsu et al., 1995 Savic et al., 1999 Gautam and Holz, Cheng et al., 2002 Elshorbagy et al.,
2001 2010
Sediment modeling Sarangi et al., 2005 Aytek and Kisi, Altunkaynak, 2009 Rajaee et al., 2009 Misra et al., 2009
2008
Groundwater modeling Bhattacharjya and He et al., 2008 Fallah-Mehdipour et Bhattacharjya and Yoon et al., 2011
Datta, 2009 al., 2013 Datta, 2009
Water quality modeling Singh et al., 2009 Pai et al., 2009 Eslamian and Dhar and Datta, Singh et al., 2011
Lavaei, 2009 2009
1957

1958

90
1959

Table 2. Review papers concerning particular sub-sets of AI models and wavelet transform
used in hydrology.

Review subject Authors year Paper/Book title

ASCE Task Committee on
Artificial Neural Networks in hydrology II: Hydrologic
Application of Artificial 2000
Applications
Neural Networks in Hydrology
Neural networks for the prediction and forecasting of water
Maier and Dandy 2000 resources variables: a review of modelling issues and
applications
Govindaraju and Rao 2000 Artificial neural networks in hydrology
Dawson and Wilby 2001 Hydrological modelling using artificial neural networks.
Reviews on Data-driven modeling and computational intelligence
Solomatine 2005
hydrological methods in hydrology
applications Computational intelligence in earth sciences and
of AI Cherkassky et al. 2006
environmental applications
Review of self-organizing map (SOM) in water resources:
Kalteh et al. 2008
analysis, modeling, and application
Data-driven modelling: some past experiences and new
Solomatine and Ostfeld 2008
approaches.
Methods used for the development of neural networks for the
Maier et al. 2010 prediction of water resource variables in river systems:
Current status and future directions.
Two decades of anarchy? Emerging themes and outstanding
Abrahart et al. 2012
challenges for neural network river forecasting.
Kumar and Foufoula-Georgiou 1997 Wavelet Analysis for Geophysical Applications.
Recent advances in wavelet analyses: Part 1. A review of
Reviews on Labat 2005
concepts.
hydrological What drives high flow events in the Swiss Alps? Recent
applications Schaefli et al. 2007 developments in wavelet spectral analysis and their
of Wavelet application to hydrology
A review on the applications of wavelet transform in
Sang 2013
hydrology time series analysis
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Table 3. Details of the surveyed papers, including year of publication, authors, where hybrid wavelet-AI methods
were used to predict hydrological variables.
Wavelet
Paper Type of AI
Author (year) transform Variables Time Scale
No. technique
type
Mwale and Gan (2005) ANN, GA CWT Precipitation Monthly
Mwale et al. (2007) ANN, GA CWT Precipitation Monthly
Partal and Kisi (2007) ANFIS DWT Precipitation Daily
Nourani et al. (2009a) ANN DWT Precipitation Monthly
9 Partal and Cigizoglu (2009) ANN DWT Precipitation Daily
Kuo et al. (2010a) ANN, GA CWT Precipitation Seasonal
Kisi and Shiri (2011) GEP, NF DWT Precipitation Daily
Kisi and Cimen (2012) SVM DWT Precipitation Daily
Ramana et al. (2013) ANN DWT Precipitation Monthly
Cannas et al. (2006) ANN DWT,CWT Runoff Monthly
Kisi (2008) ANN DWT Stream-flow Monthly
Wang et al. (2009) ANN DWT Runoff Daily, Annually
Wu et al. (2009) ANN DWT Runoff Daily
Stream-flow, Meteorological
Adamowski (2008a) ANN CWT Daily
data
Zhou et al. (2008) ANN DWT Discharge Monthly
Kisi (2009a) ANN DWT Stream-flow Daily
Partal (2009a) ANN DWT Stream-flow Monthly
Mwale and Gan (2010) ANN, GA CWT runoff Monthly
Adamowski and Sun (2010) ANN DWT Stream-flow Daily
Stream-flow, Rainfall,
Kuo et al. (2010b) ANN,GA CWT Seasonal, Daily
Air temperature
Pramanik et al. (2010) ANN DWT Stream-flow daily
Tiwari and Chatterjee (2010) ANN- Bootstrap DWT River water level Hourly
Daily, Monthly,
Shiri and Kisi (2010) ANFIS DWT Stream-flow
Yearly
Wang et al. (2011) Statistical method DWT Streamflow Daily
Kisi (2011a) ANN DWT Stream-flow Monthly
35 Kisi and Partal (2011) NF DWT Stream-flow Monthly
Guo et al. (2011) SVM DWT Stream-flow Monthly
Kisi and Cimen (2011) SVM DWT Stream-flow Monthly
Tiwari and Chatterjee (2011) ANN-Bootstrap DWT Discharge Daily
Krishna et al. (2011) ANN DWT Stream-flow Daily
Tiwari et al. (2012) ANN, SOM DWT Discharge Daily
Kalteh (2013) SVR, ANN DWT Stream-flow Monthly
Wei et al. (2012) ANN DWT River discharge Monthly
Ren et al. (2011) ANFIS DWT, CWT Runoff Monthly
Adamowski and Prokoph (2013) ANN CWT Stream-flow Daily
Maheswaran and Khosa (2013a) ANN DWT, WVC Stream-flow Daily
Maheswaran and Khosa (2012b) ANN DWT, WVC Stream-flow Monthly
Krishna, B., (2013) ANN DWT Inflow Daily
Badrzadeh et al. (2013) ANN, ANFIS DWT River flow Daily
Danandeh Mehr et al. (2013a) ANN, GP DWT Stream-flow Monthly
Danandeh Mehr et al. (2013b) ANN DWT Stream-flow Monthly
Sahay and Srivastava (2013) ANN, GA DWT Flood Daily
Sang (2013b) WMF DWT Rainfall, Runoff Monthly, Daily
Maheswaran et al. (2013) ANN DWT, WVC Stream-flow Daily, Weekly,

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 Monthly
Stream-flow, Rainfall,
Anctil and Tape (2004) ANN CWT Daily
Evapotranspiration
Remesan et al. (2009) ANN DWT Rainfall, Runoff Daily
Nourani et al. (2009b) ANN DWT Rainfall, Runoff daily
Nourani et al. (2011) ANN, ANFIS DWT Rainfall, Runoff Daily, Monthly
Rainfall,
Wang et al. (2011) ANN, GA DWT Hourly
Stream-flow
Morphological data,
12 Adamowski et al. (2011) ANN-MARS DWT Daily
Rainfall, Runoff
Nourani et al. (2012) ANN, GP DWT Rainfall, Runoff Daily, Monthly
Adamowski and Prasher (2012) SVR, ANN DWT Rainfall, Runoff Daily
rainfall, discharge,
Nayak et al. (2013) ANN DWT Daily
evaporation
Nourani et al. (2013a) ANN, SOM DWT Rainfall, Runoff Daily
Kamruzzaman et al. (2013) AR DWT Rainfall, Stream
Nourani and Parhizkar (2013) ANN, SOM DWT,CWT Rainfall, Runoff Daily, Monthly
Partal and Cigizoglu (2008) ANN DWT SSL Daily
Mirbagheri et al. (2010) ANN, NF DWT SSL, Discharge Daily
Kisi (2010) ANN DWT SSL Daily
Rajaee (2010) NF DWT SSL Daily
10 Rajaee et al. (2010) NF DWT SSL Daily
Rajaee et al. (2009) ANN,NF DWT SSL Daily
Rajaee et al. (2011) ANN DWT SSL Daily
Shiri and Kisi (2012) ANN, GEP, NF DWT SSL, Discharge Daily
Liu et al. (2013) ANN DWT SSC Daily
Nourani et al. (2013b) ANN DWT Stream-flow, SSL Daily
Adamowski and Chan (2011) ANN DWT GWL Monthly
Maheswaran and Khosa (2013b) ANN WVC GWL Monthly
5 Kisi and Shiri (2012) ANFIS DWT GWL Daily
Moosavi et al. (2013a) ANN, ANFIS DWT GWL Monthly
Moosavi et al. (2013b) ANN, ANFIS DWT GWL Monthly
Kim and Valdes (2003) ANN DWT Drought Monthly
Belayneh and Adamowski (2013) AN DWT SPI, Drought Monthly
Belayneh et al. (2014) ANN, SVR DWT SPI, Drought Monthly
Shirmohammadi et al. (2013) ANN, ANFIS DWT Drought Monthly
Wang and Ding (2003) ANN DWT Shallow GWL, Discharge Daily, Monthly
Soil moisture-Precipitation-
Lauzon et al. (2004) SOM CWT Daily
Flow
soil water content,
Deng et al. (2011) SVM DWT precipitation, temperature, Daily
evaporation
Adamowski (2008b) ANN CWT Snowmelt river flood Daily
Noori et al. (2009) ANN, ANFIS CWT Waste Generation Weekly
32 Partal (2009b) ANN DWT Evapotranspiration Daily
Shankar et al. (2011) Fuzzy DWT Land cover -------
Active
Abghari et al. (2012) ANN Evapotranspiration Daily
function
Urban water demand,
Adamowski et al. (2012) ANN DWT Daily
Precipitation, Temperature
Kisi (2009b) ANN DWT Lake level Monthly
Campisi et al. (2012) ANN DWT Urban water demand Monthly
Tiwari and Adamowski (2013) Bootstrap-ANN DWT Urban water demand Daily, Monthly
Ozger (2010) ANN, ANFIS CWT Wave height Hourly
Kisi (2011b) ANN DWT River-stage Daily
Deka and Prahlada (2012) ANN DWT wave height Hourly
Shekarrizfard et al. (2012) ANN DWT Meteorological data Daily

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 Siwek and Osowski (2012) ANN, SVM DWT Meteorological data Daily
Najah et al. (2012) ANFIS DWT water quality parameters Monthly
Karran et al. (2013) ANN,SVR DWT climate regimes Daily
Yu et al. (2013) NF DWT Hydro-meteorological data Daily
Monthly,
Nalley et al. (2013) Trend test DWT Air temperature
Seasonally,Annually
Monthly,
Pingale et al. (2013 Trend test DWT Temperature, rainfall
Seasonally,Annually
Temperature and thermal
Eynard et al. (2011) ANN DWT Monthly
power consumption
Liu et al. (2013a) GA, PSO DWT Wind speed sampling
Liu et al. (2013b) ANN DWT, Packet Wind speed sampling
Liu et al. (2014) SVM DWT Wind speed sampling
Heat fluxes,
Evrendilek (2012) ANN DWT sampling
evapotranspiration
Wang et al. (2013) ANN, ARIMA DWT Water quality properties Monthly
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