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Streamflow (Qflow) prediction is one of the essential steps for the reliable and robust water resources planning and management. It is highly vital for hydropower operation, agricultural planning, and flood control. In this study, the convolution neural network (CNN) and Long-Short-term Memory network (LSTM) are combined to make a new integrated model called CNN-LSTM to predict the hourly Qflow (short-term) at Brisbane River and Teewah Creek, Australia. The CNN layers were used to extract the features of Qflow time-series, while the LSTM networks use these features from CNN for Qflow time series prediction. The proposed CNN-LSTM model is benchmarked against the standalone model CNN, LSTM, and Deep Neural Network models and several conventional artificial intelligence (AI) models. Qflow prediction is conducted for different time intervals with the length of 1-Week, 2-Weeks, 4-Weeks, and 9-Months, respectively. With the help of different performance metrics and graphical analysis visualization, the experimental results reveal that with small residual error between the actual and predicted Qflow, the CNN-LSTM model outperforms all the benchmarked conventional AI models as well as ensemble models for all the time intervals. With 84% of Qflow prediction error below the range of 0.05 m3 s−1, CNN-LSTM demonstrates a better performance compared to 80% and 66% for LSTM and DNN, respectively. In summary, the results reveal that the proposed CNN-LSTM model based on the novel framework yields more accurate predictions. Thus, CNN-LSTM has significant practical value in Qflow prediction.

Solar energy predictive models designed to emulate the long-term (e.g., monthly) global solar radiation (GSR) trained with satellite-derived predictors can be employed as decision tenets in the exploration, installation and management of solar energy production systems in remote and inaccessible solar-powered sites. In spite of a plethora of models designed for GSR prediction, deep learning, representing a state-of-the-art intelligent tool, remains an attractive approach for renewable energy exploration, monitoring and forecasting. In this paper, algorithms based on deep belief networks and deep neural networks are designed to predict long-term GSR. Deep learning algorithms trained with publicly-accessible Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite data are tested in Australia’s solar cities to predict the monthly GSR: single hidden layer and ensemble models. The monthly-scale MODIS-derived predictors (2003–2018) are adopted, with 15 diverse feature selection approaches including a Gaussian Emulation Machine for sensitivity analysis used to select optimal MODIS-predictor variables to simulate GSR against ground-truth values. Several statistical score metrics are adopted to comprehensively verify surface GSR simulations to ascertain the practicality of deep belief and deep neural networks. In the testing phase, deep learning models generate significantly lower absolute percentage bias (≤3%) and high Kling–Gupta efficiency (≥97.5%) values compared to the single hidden layer and ensemble model. This study ascertains that the optimal MODIS input variables employed in GSR prediction for solar energy applications can be relatively different for diverse sites, advocating a need for feature selection prior to the modelling of GSR. The proposed deep learning approach can be adopted to identify solar energy potential proactively in locations where it is impossible to install an environmental monitoring data acquisition instrument. Hence, MODIS and other related satellite-derived predictors can be incorporated for solar energy prediction as a strategy for long-term renewable energy exploration.