Fig. 2

(a) LSTM performance over CONUS river sites based on the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) metric, and (b) Feature importance test of the LSTM model. The x-axis reports the selected predictors, and the y-axis indicates the corresponding decrease in NSE triggered by varying the predictor for the validation period of the daily discharge. The boxplot distributions summarize the NSE change results for the selected 638 basins. It indicates the median (horizontal bar), the 25th and 75th percentile interval (box) and the maximum and minimum values (whiskers).