The Everglades play a crucial role in flood and drought regulation, water resource planning, and ecosystem management in the surrounding regions. However, traditional physics-based and statistical methods for predicting water levels often face significant challenges, including high computational costs and limited adaptability to diverse or unforeseen conditions. Recent advancements in large time series models have demonstrated the potential to address these limitations, with state-of-the-art deep learning and foundation models achieving remarkable success in time series forecasting across various domains. Despite this progress, their application to critical environmental systems, such as the Everglades, remains underexplored. In this study, we fill the gap by investigating twelve task-specific models and five time series foundation models across six categories for a real-world application focused on water level prediction in the Everglades. Our primary results show that the foundation model Chronos significantly outperforms all other models while the remaining foundation models exhibit relatively poor performance. We also noticed that the performance of task-specific models varies with the model architectures, and discussed the possible reasons. We hope our study and findings will inspire the community to explore the applicability of large time series models in hydrological applications. The code and data are available at https://github.com/rahuul2992000/

Accurate water level forecasting is crucial for managing ecosystems such as the Everglades, a subtropical wetland vital for flood mitigation, drought management, water resource planning, and biodiversity conservation. While recent advances in deep learning, particularly time series foundation models, have demonstrated success in general-domain forecasting, their application in hydrology remains underex-plored. Furthermore, they often struggle to generalize across diverse unseen datasets and domains, due to the lack of effective mechanisms for adaptation. To address this gap, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented Forecasting (RAF) into the hydrology domain, proposing a framework that retrieves historically analogous multivariate hydrological episodes to enrich the model input before forecasting. By maintaining an external archive of past observations, RAF identifies and incorporates relevant patterns from historical data, thereby enhancing contextual awareness and predictive accuracy without requiring the model for task-specific retraining or fine-tuning. Furthermore, we explore and compare both similarity-based and mutual information -based RAF methods. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on real-world data from the Everglades, demonstrating that the RAF framework yields substantial improvements in water level forecasting accuracy. This study highlights the potential of RAF approaches in environmental hydrology and paves the way for broader adoption of adaptive AI methods by domain experts in ecosystem management.

Understanding the combined influences of meteorological and hydrological factors on water level and flood events is essential, particularly in today's changing climate environments. Transformer, as one kind of the cutting-edge deep learning methods, offers an effective approach to model intricate nonlinear processes, enables the extraction of key features and water level predictions. EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods play important roles in enhancing the understandings of how different factors impact water level. In this study, we propose a Transformer variant by integrating sparse attention mechanism and introducing nonlinear output layer for the decoder module. The variant model is utilized for multi-step forecasting of water level, by considering meteorological and hydrological factors simultaneously. It is shown that the variant model outperforms traditional Transformer across different lead times with respect to various evaluation metrics. The sensitivity analyses based on XAI technology demonstrate the significant influence of meteorological factors on water level evolution, in which temperature is shown to be the most dominant meteorological factor. Therefore, incorporating both meteorological and hydrological factors is necessary for reliable hydrological prediction and flood prevention. In the meantime, XAI technology provides insights into certain predictions, which is beneficial for understanding the prediction results and evaluating the reasonability.

Forecasting time series with extreme events has been a challenging and prevalent research topic, especially when the time series data are affected by complicated uncertain factors, such as is the case in hydrologic prediction. Diverse traditional and deep learning models have been applied to discover the nonlinear relationships and recognize the complex patterns in these types of data. However, existing methods usually ignore the negative influence of imbalanced data, or severe events, on model training. Moreover, methods are usually evaluated on a small number of generally well-behaved time series, which does not show their ability to generalize. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel probability-enhanced neural network model, called NEC+, which concurrently learns extreme and normal prediction functions and a way to choose among them via selective back propagation. We evaluate the proposed model on the difficult 3-day ahead hourly water level prediction task applied to 9 reservoirs in California. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits superior generalization ability on data with diverse distributions.