{"ID":2892266,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15614","arxiv_id":"2507.15614","title":"Accelerating HEC-RAS: A Recurrent Neural Operator for Rapid River Forecasting","abstract":"Physics-based solvers like HEC-RAS provide high-fidelity river forecasts but are too computationally intensive for on-the-fly decision-making during flood events. The central challenge is to accelerate these simulations without sacrificing accuracy. This paper introduces a deep learning surrogate that treats HEC-RAS not as a solver but as a data-generation engine. We propose a hybrid, auto-regressive architecture that combines a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to capture short-term temporal dynamics with a Geometry-Aware Fourier Neural Operator (Geo-FNO) to model long-range spatial dependencies along a river reach. The model learns underlying physics implicitly from a minimal eight-channel feature vector encoding dynamic state, static geometry, and boundary forcings extracted directly from native HEC-RAS files. Trained on 67 reaches of the Mississippi River Basin, the surrogate was evaluated on a year-long, unseen hold-out simulation. Results show the model achieves a strong predictive accuracy, with a median absolute stage error of 0.31 feet. Critically, for a full 67-reach ensemble forecast, our surrogate reduces the required wall-clock time from 139 minutes to 40 minutes, a speedup of nearly 3.5 times over the traditional solver. The success of this data-driven approach demonstrates that robust feature engineering can produce a viable, high-speed replacement for conventional hydraulic models, improving the computational feasibility of large-scale ensemble flood forecasting.","short_abstract":"Physics-based solvers like HEC-RAS provide high-fidelity river forecasts but are too computationally intensive for on-the-fly decision-making during flood events. The central challenge is to accelerate these simulations without sacrificing accuracy. This paper introduces a deep learning surrogate that treats HEC-RAS no...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15614","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15614v1","authors":"[\"Edward Holmberg\",\"Pujan Pokhrel\",\"Maximilian Zoch\",\"Elias Ioup\",\"Ken Pathak\",\"Steven Sloan\",\"Kendall Niles\",\"Jay Ratcliff\",\"Maik Flanagin\",\"Christian Guetl\",\"Julian Simeonov\",\"Mahdi Abdelguerfi\"]","published":"2025-07-21T13:38:54Z","proceeding":"cs.LG","tasks":"[\"cs.LG\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}