HydroGAT: Distributed Heterogeneous Graph Attention Transformer for Spatiotemporal Flood Prediction

Abstract

Accurate flood forecasting remains a challenge for water-resource management, as it demands modeling of local, time-varying runoff drivers (e.g., rainfall-induced peaks, baseflow trends) and complex spatial interactions across a river network. Traditional data-driven approaches, such as convolutional networks and sequence-based models, ignore topological information about the region. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) propagate information exactly along the river network, which is ideal for learning hydrological routing. However, state-of-the-art GNN-based flood prediction models collapse pixels to coarse catchment polygons as the cost of training explodes with graph size and higher resolution. Furthermore, most existing methods treat spatial and temporal dependencies separately, either applying GNNs solely on spatial graphs or transformers purely on temporal sequences, thus failing to simultaneously capture spatiotemporal interactions critical for accurate flood prediction. We introduce a heterogenous basin graph where every land and river pixel is a node connected by physical hydrological flow directions and inter-catchment relationships. We propose HydroGAT, a spatiotemporal network that adaptively learns local temporal importance and the most influential upstream locations. Evaluated in two Midwestern US basins and across five baseline architectures, our model achieves higher NSE (up to 0.97), improved KGE (up to 0.96), and low bias (PBIAS within $\pm$5%) in hourly discharge prediction, while offering interpretable attention maps that reveal sparse, structured intercatchment influences. To support high-resolution basin-scale training, we develop a distributed data-parallel pipeline that scales efficiently up to 64 NVIDIA A100 GPUs on NERSC Perlmutter supercomputer, demonstrating up to 15x speedup across machines. Our code is available at https://github.com/swapp-lab/HydroGAT.