FFTSF: Revisiting Sub-Seasonal Streamflow Forecasting with Simple Feedforward Network

Abstract

Accurate short-to-subseasonal streamflow forecasts are vital for water management, including flood preparedness, drought mitigation, hydropower scheduling, and ecosystem protection. However, extending a forecast beyond a few days remains challenging due to complexity of hydrological processes. While recent self-attention based transformer architectures such as iTransformer have gained traction in time-series forecasting, these models suffer from several critical limitations: (1) significant computational overhead that scales quadratically with sequence length, (2) vulnerability to overfitting on limited hydrological datasets, (3) degraded performance on long-horizon forecasts due to attention decay, and (4) excessive architectural complexity that hampers interpretability and operational deployment. In this study, we propose a simple Feedforward Time Series Forecasting (FFTSF) network that directly addresses these limitations through its lightweight architecture and long-range forecasting capabilities. We evaluate FFTSF across 178 USGS stream gauges spanning diverse climate regimes by forecasting lead times of 1-, 7-, 14-, and 30-days. Our results demonstrate that FFTSF achieves competitive performance at short lead times (NSE of 0.778 for 1-day forecasts) while substantially outperforming complex baselines at longer forecast period, achieving the highest NSE (0.271) at 30-day forecasts with greater robustness and stability. For 30-day forecasts, FFTSF achieves a 71% improvement over NLinear, 57% improvement over DLinear and 12% improvement over the computationally intensive iTransformer while requiring fewer computational resources. Our findings reveal that architectural complexity is not necessary for hydrological forecasting, demonstrating that well-designed simple models can outperform attention mechanisms for subseasonal streamflow forecasting. The computational efficiency and consistent long-range performance of FFTSF make it suitable for water management applications where reliable extended forecasts are essential.