Using Artificial Neural Network Approach for Simultaneous Forecasting of Weekly Groundwater Levels at Multiple Sites

Reliable forecast of groundwater level is necessary for its sustainable use and for planning land and water management strategies. This paper deals with an application of artificial neural network (ANN) approach to the weekly forecasting of groundwater levels in multiple wells located over a river basin. Gradient descent with momentum and adaptive learning rate backpropagation (GDX) algorithm was employed to predict groundwater levels 1 week ahead at 18 sites over the study area. Based on the domain knowledge and pertinent statistical analysis, appropriate set of inputs for the ANN model was selected. This consisted of weekly rainfall, pan evaporation, river stage, water level in the surface drain, pumping rates of 18 sites and groundwater levels of 18 sites in the previous week, which led to 40 input nodes and 18 output nodes. During training of the ANN model, the optimum number of hidden neurons was found to be 40 and the model performance was found satisfactory (RMSE = 0.2397 m, r = 0.9861, and NSE = 0.9722). During testing of the model, the values of statistical indicators RMSE, r and NSE were 0.4118 m, 0.9715 and 0.9288, respectively. Using the same inputs, the developed ANN model was further used for forecasting groundwater levels 2, 3 and 4 weeks ahead in 18 tubewells. The model performance was better while forecasting groundwater levels at shorter lead times (up to 2 weeks) than that for larger lead times.