Flow forecast by SWAT model and ANN in Pracana basin, Portugal

0965-9978/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.advengsoft.2008.08.002 * Corresponding author. Present address: Civil Eng ican University of Sharjah, P.O. Box 26666, Sharjah, U E-mail addresses: [email protected] ( edu.tr, [email protected] (E. Kahya). URL: http://atlas.cc.itu.edu.tr/~kahyae (E. Kahya). 1 Present address: Department of Water Engineering of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Nethe This study provides a unique opportunity to analyze the issue of flow forecast based on the soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) and artificial neural network (ANN) models. In last two decades, the ANNs have been extensively applied to various water resources system problems. In this study, the ANNs were applied to the daily flow of the Pracana basin in Portugal. The comparison of ANN models and a process-based model SWAT was established based on their prediction accuracy. The ANN model was found to be more successful than the SWAT in relation to better forecast of peak flow. Nevertheless the SWAT model results revealed a better value of mean squared error. The results of this study, in general, showed that ANNs can be powerful tools in daily flow forecasts. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.