This challenge seeks to improve the skill of short-term streamflow forecasts (10 days). Solvers will develop and implement their methods for locations across the western United States, attempting to outperform state of practice streamflow forecasts.
There will be 12 monthly competitions occurring over a year-long period where solvers provide real-time daily streamflow forecasts. Know more about the year-long series here.
This is the May challenge.
Streamflow forecasts are integral to water management. With higher skill forecasts, water managers can likely better operate facilities for high flows, to mitigate drought impacts, and to achieve other improved outcomes (e.g. hydropower generation).
The growing capability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) has begun to be applied toward generating streamflow forecasts. This has the potential to complement traditional physically based streamflow forecast methods via hybrid or purely data-driven approaches. This challenge aims to spur innovation in the field of streamflow forecasting, with emphasis on assessing the potential application of ML/AI for streamflow forecasting.
Your task is to predict a 10-day streamflow forecast in 6 hours intervals for the specific locations (i. e., 40 values per location). You must return the streamflow forecast in cubic feet per second. The first value should be for 18:00 on the 1st day, the last value should be at 12:00 on the 11th day). All times are in UTC (also called GMT).
The quality of your algorithm will be judged by how closely the predicted streamflow matches the actual, measured values. See Scoring for details.
We will evaluate the solutions on live data.
SCHEDULE OF CHALLENGES
(Current challenge highlighted.)
Month Quarter
October 2020 Q1
November 2020 Q1
December 2020 Q1
January 2021 Q2
February 2021 Q2
March 2021 Q2
April 2021 Q3
May 2021 Q3
June 2021 Q3
July 2021 Q4
August 2021 Q4
September 2021 Q4
INPUT DATA
There is no official data set. We have prepared a list of data sources which we expect may be useful for the task. It is located here. You are also allowed to use any other data, provided it is freely available. You may also use data that may not be freely available provided: (1) they can be made available to Topcoder for scoring/validation and (2) they could be procured by the client for future use.
Awards:-
The total sum of all prizes is $466,000.
The sum of any bonus funds that are not awarded will be reallocated to later prizes purses. 50% of it will go to the next quarter, and the other 50% will go towards the overall prize. Any funds not awarded during the overall bonus evaluation (when there are less than 10 competitors beating RFC forecast score) will be redistributed to the winning positions.
Deadline:- 31-05-2021
