In establishing adequate climate change policies regarding water resource development and management, the most essential step is performing a rainfall-runoff analysis. To this end, although several physical models have been developed and tested in many studies, they require a complex grid-based parameterization that uses climate, topography, land-use, and geology data to simulate spatiotemporal runoff. Furthermore, physical rainfall-runoff models also suffer from uncertainty originating from insufficient data quality and quantity, unreliable parameters, and imperfect model structures. As an alternative, this study proposes a rainfall-runoff analysis system for the Kratie station on the Mekong River mainstream using the long short-term memory (LSTM) model, a data-based black-box method. Future runoff variations were simulated by applying a climate change scenario. To assess the applicability of the LSTM model, its result was compared with a runoff analysis using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. The following steps (dataset periods in parentheses) were carried out within the SWAT approach: parameter correction (2000–2005), verification (2006–2007), and prediction (2008–2100), while the LSTM model went through the process of training (1980–2005), verification (2006–2007), and prediction (2008–2100). Globally available data were fed into the algorithms, with the exception of the observed discharge and temperature data, which could not be acquired. The bias-corrected Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5 climate change scenarios were used to predict future runoff. When the reproducibility at the Kratie station for the verification period of the two models (2006–2007) was evaluated, the SWAT model showed a Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) value of 0.84, while the LSTM model showed a higher accuracy, NSE = 0.99. The trend analysis result of the runoff prediction for the Kratie station over the 2008–2100 period did not show a statistically significant trend for neither scenario nor model. However, both models found that the annual mean flow rate in the RCP 8.5 scenario showed greater variability than in the RCP 4.5 scenario. These findings confirm that the LSTM runoff prediction presents a higher reproducibility than that of the SWAT model in simulating runoff variation according to time-series changes. Therefore, the LSTM model, which derives relatively accurate results with a small amount of data, is an effective approach to large-scale hydrologic modeling when only runoff time-series are available.

This study aimed to assess the feasibility of utilizing rainfall predictions from numerical forecasting systems for managing frequent localized flash floods caused by climate change. A flood event in the Seomjin River Basin in August 2020 was selected to evaluate the accuracy of rainfall predictions from the Local Data Assimilation Prediction System (LDAPS) and verify the reliability of discharge predictions using the forecasted rainfall. The forecasted rainfall data were combined at 6-, 12-, 24, and 48-h intervals for validation. The 6-h combination demonstrated the highest reproducibility, while the 12-hour combination provided satisfactory results. Thus, discharge modeling using LDAPS provides relatively reliable results for short-term predictions; however, long-term predictions require improvement. The findings of this study can facilitate the evaluation of the potential of LDAPS for flood prediction and management.