Flood Sentinel — Forecast Skill Cards

Methodology

R² — Coefficient of determination on held-out test set (15% of data)
CV R² — 5-fold TimeSeriesSplit cross-validation (chronological)
MAE / RMSE — Mean absolute / root-mean-square error in metres
Quality gates — Reject if R² < 0 (worse than mean) or CV R² < 0 (worse than persistence)
Training window — 13+ years of hourly data (2013-2026)
Horizons — 1h, 3h, 6h, 12h, 24h, 48h, 72h, 96h, 120h, 168h (7 days)
Models ensemble — XGBoost, LightGBM, RandomForest, GradientBoosting, Ridge
Confidence bands — Conformal prediction (90% coverage, regime-stratified)
NWP rainfall — Future forecast rainfall from Open-Meteo included as features
Tidal handling — Multi-constituent harmonic analysis via utide library

Greater Sydney

Stations

176

Models Trained

0.994

Avg R² @ 1h

0.643

Avg R² @ 24h

0.489

Avg R² @ 72h

Station	River	R² 1h	R² 6h	R² 24h	R² 72h	Models
Camden Weir 212216	Nepean River	0.997	0.970	0.578	0.615	119/119
Wallacia Weir 212202	Nepean River	0.998	—	—	—	10/10
Penrith Weir 212201	Nepean River	—	—	—	—	0/0
North Richmond 212200	Hawkesbury River	0.985	—	—	—	2/2
Windsor 212903	Hawkesbury River	0.996	0.930	0.708	0.362	45/45
Sackville 212406 · tidal	Hawkesbury River	—	—	—	—	0/0
Lower Portland 212407 · tidal	Hawkesbury River	—	—	—	—	0/0
Webbs Creek 212408 · tidal	Hawkesbury River	—	—	—	—	0/0

Far North Queensland

Stations

Models Trained

—

Avg R² @ 1h

—

Avg R² @ 24h

—

Avg R² @ 72h

Station	River	R² 1h	R² 6h	R² 24h	R² 72h	Models
Daintree Village 531110 · tidal	Daintree River	—	—	—	—	0/0

Richmond

Stations

Models Trained

—

Avg R² @ 1h

—

Avg R² @ 24h

—

Avg R² @ 72h

Station	River	R² 1h	R² 6h	R² 24h	R² 72h	Models
Lismore (Wilsons River) 203900	Wilsons River	—	—	—	—	0/0
Casino 203010	Richmond River	—	—	—	—	0/0

South Coast NSW

Stations

Models Trained

—

Avg R² @ 1h

0.950

Avg R² @ 24h

—

Avg R² @ 72h

Station	River	R² 1h	R² 6h	R² 24h	R² 72h	Models
Lake Conjola 216420 · tidal	Lake Conjola	—	0.995	0.950	—	3/3