Comparison of methodologies in river flow prediciton. The Paiva river case.

Abstract

The aim of this work is to predict a future value of the daily mean discharge of the river Paiva. Several approaches are considered. Methods from Dynamical Systems and Stochastic Processes are applied. The Takens embedding shows an intermittent dynamical behaviour of the river Paiva where the laminar phase occurs in the absence of rainfall. The forcing of the system is non-deterministic and is due to the precipitation occurrence. Good predictability is found in the laminar regime.