Assessing the Impact of the Farakka Barrage on Hydrological Alteration in the Padma River with Future Insight

Climate change and human interventions (e.g., massive barrages, dams, sand mining, sluice gates) in the Ganga–Padma River (India Bangladesh) have escalated recent decades, disrupting natural flow regime habitat. This study employed innovative trend analysis (ITA), range of variability approach (RVA), continuous wavelet (CWA) to quantify past future hydrological river because building Farakka Barrage (FB). We also forecast regimes using unique hybrid machine learning techniques based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). The ITA findings revealed that average discharge trended substantially negatively throughout dry season (January–May). However, RVA showed was lower than environmental flows. CWA indicated FB has a significant influence periodicity streamflow regime. PSO-Reduced Error Pruning Tree (REPTree) best fit for prediction (RMSE = 0.14), PSO-random forest (RF) match maximum 0.3), PSO-M5P 0.18) better lowest prediction. Furthermore, basin’s reduced over time, concerning riparian environment. research describes measurement forecasts upcoming days, which might be valuable developing sustainable water resource management plans this location.