Flood Forecasting Using Artificial Neural Networks

Flood disasters continue to occur in many countries in the world and cause tremendous casualties and property damage. To mitigate the effects of floods, a range of structural and non-structural measures have been employed including dykes, channelling, flood-proofing property, land-use regulation and flood warning schemes. Such schemes can include the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for modelling the rainfall run-off process as it is a quick and flexible approach which gives very promising results. However, the inability of ANN to extrapolate beyond the limits of the training range is a serious limitation of the method, and this book examines ways of side-stepping or solving this complex issue.