2 results
A novel workflow for streamflow prediction in the presence of missing gauge observations
- Rendani Mbuvha, Julien Y.P. Adounkpe, Mandela C.M. Houngnibo, Wilson T. Mongwe, Zahir Nikraftar, Tshilidzi Marwala, Nathaniel K. Newlands
-
- Journal:
- Environmental Data Science / Volume 2 / 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 July 2023, e23
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- Open access
- HTML
- Export citation
-
Streamflow predictions are vital for detecting flood and drought events. Such predictions are even more critical to Sub-Saharan African regions that are vulnerable to the increasing frequency and intensity of such events. These regions are sparsely gaged, with few available gaging stations that are often plagued with missing data due to various causes, such as harsh environmental conditions and constrained operational resources. This work presents a novel workflow for predicting streamflow in the presence of missing gage observations. We leverage bias correction of the Group on Earth Observations Global Water and Sustainability Initiative ECMWF streamflow service (GESS) forecasts for missing data imputation and predict future streamflow using the state-of-the-art temporal fusion transformers (TFTs) at 10 river gaging stations in the Benin Republic. We show by simulating missingness in a testing period that GESS forecasts have a significant bias that results in poor imputation performance over the 10 Beninese stations. Our findings suggest that overall bias correction by Elastic Net and Gaussian Process regression achieves superior performance relative to traditional imputation by established methods. We also show that the TFT yields high predictive skill and further provides explanations for predictions through the weights of its attention mechanism. The findings of this work provide a basis for integrating Global streamflow prediction model data and the state-of-the-art machine learning models into operational early-warning decision-making systems in resource-constrained countries vulnerable to drought and flooding due to extreme weather events.
Chapter 11 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution in Africa
- Edited by J. Mark Munoz, Alka Maurya
-
- Book:
- International Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 January 2022, pp 91-106
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
We are now entering a new era of socio-economic disruption arising from the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) – which is characterized by the amalgamation of the digital, biological and physical realms (Ndung’u and Signé 2020). A key question on the African agenda is how Africa can leverage 4IR for its benefit and not miss out this time around. This chapter deals with this question and explores some of the crucial cross-cutting issues surrounding the topic of 4IR in the African context. This work is intended to serve as a high-level African perspective of the fourth industrial revolution that will assist scholars, policy-makers, researchers, governments, business and other stakeholders in their respective roles in taking Africa forward.
Technologies of the 4IR are perhaps not a far-off vision for Africa (AfDB 2019), and are already playing a pivotal role as Africa transitions into the mainstream global economy. There are ongoing developments across the continent with recent expansions by tech giants such as Netflix, Facebook, Google and so on into Africa, and the rapid growth of tech start-ups and other such exciting developments in Africa's emerging technology landscape (Bright 2016). It has become clear that industries and governments must invest in and leverage 4IR technologies to make gains in the modern-day global economy (Marwala 2019). Although there has been some positive movement on the continent, with improved human development indices, and better regional interactions and economic progress, there are very deep concerns about the continent potentially missing out on reaping the growth benefits of 4IR due to the lack of human capacity development, adequate infrastructure and coherent leadership (Mead 2017; Radu 2020). These major thematic areas, that is, infrastructure, human capacity development and policy are explored in this chapter in the context of Africa's preparedness for 4IR. Taking into account that Africa is a vast and diverse continent, a high-level analysis of these issues is carried out with emphasis placed on the critical commonalities surrounding these issues as they pertain to Africa's 54 countries. This reveals some of the major challenges and opportunities relating to the aforementioned transition.
This chapter is organized as follows.