Hapi: A Multivariable Land-Surface Transformer for Medium-Range Hydrological Forecasting at Continental Scale

Hong Zhang, John K. Hutchison, Rao Kotamarthi, Jeremy Feinstein, Haiwen Guan +5

Accurate flood forecasts several days in advance are essential for flood control, water-resource management, and emergency response. A central challenge is to produce high-resolution forecasts across continental domains where hydrological behavior varies widely from place to place. We developed Hapi, a U-Net Swin Transformer that uses fine three-dimensional patches and hierarchical shifted-window attention to forecast river discharge, surface runoff, snow water equivalent, and soil wetness index across the contiguous United States. The model produces medium-range forecasts (24--72~h) at $0.05^{\circ}$ resolution with adaptive task weighting and required only 0.11 seconds for a four-variable 72-h CONUS forecast on one A100 GPU. In a held-out 2024 potential-skill evaluation with ERA5-Land inputs prescribed over the forecast horizon, Hapi achieved the highest F1-score for floods in 20 of 21 comparisons across seven GloFAS return periods and three forecast leads. Independent validation against observed daily discharge at 3{,}881 U.S. Geological Survey gauges showed that Hapi achieved the highest median Nash--Sutcliffe efficiency at every lead, supported by regional-cluster bootstrap…