ABSTRACT
Exploring water resources management decisions can be supported based on a variety of hydrologic modeling techniques. The essential collection of meteorological and catchment properties (e.g., precipitation, temperature, land use and vegetation, soil, topography, and lithology) is inevitable. The Tarim River Basin is the largest continental river basin in Central Asia. Far from oceans, the lower Tarim River Basin is often characterized by extremely arid conditions due to the rain shadow of the surrounding Tienshan, Pamirs, Kunlun, and Altun mountains. An artificial neural networks (ANNs) model is a flexible mathematical structure capable of identifying complex nonlinear relationships between input and output data sets. However, neural nets contain no preconceptions of the model shape and are, consequently, ideal for cases with low system knowledge. ANN models have been found useful and efficient, particularly in problems for which the characteristics of the processes are difficult to describe using physical equations.
