Probabilistic Inverse Modeling: An Application in Hydrology

Rapid advancement in inverse modeling methods have brought into light their susceptibility to imperfect data. This has made it imperative to obtain more explainable and trustworthy estimates from these models. In hydrology, basin characteristics can be noisy or missing, impacting streamflow prediction. We propose a probabilistic inverse model framework that can reconstruct robust hydrology basin characteristics from dynamic input weather driver and streamflow response data. We address two aspects of building more explainable inverse models, uncertainty estimation (uncertainty due to imperfect data and imperfect model) and robustness. This can help improve the trust of water managers, handling of noisy data and reduce costs. We also propose an uncertainty based loss regularization that offers removal of 17% of temporal artifacts in reconstructions, 36% reduction in uncertainty and 4% higher coverage rate for basin characteristics. The forward model performance (streamflow estimation) is also improved by 6% using these uncertainty learning based reconstructions.