Data used in this paper are from the Ourika basin, located in
semi-arid region of Marrakech and is the most important subcatchment
of Tensift basin drainage. The basin area is 503 km2,
and its mean annual rainfall is approximately 800 mm. The rainfall
and runoff daily data at the average of Aghbalou, Oukaimeden and
Arghbar stations were used for model investigation. The data contains
information for a period of four years (2000–2003). Furthermore,
data from 2000 to 2002 constitute the training set and the
365 remaining data is used in the testing phase.
The input vector is represented by rainfall and runoff values for
the preceding 4 days (i.e., t 1, t 2, t 3, t 4). Accordingly, the
output vector represents the expected runoff value for day tðbQ
tÞ.
In this study data, the best ANN architecture was: 4–5–1 (4 input
units, 5 hidden neurons, 1 output neuron). Before training and testing
all source data are normalized into the range between 1 and
1, by using the maximum and minimum values of the variable over
the whole data sets.