Utilizing Earth Foundation Models to Enhance the Simulation Performance of Hydrological Models with AlphaEarth Embeddings

arXiv:2601.01558v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate prediction in ungauged basins (PUB) requires effective transfer across hydrologically diverse regions. While deep learning has advanced large-sample hydrological modeling, its cross-regional generalization depends in part on the static basin descriptors used to guide model behavior. Earth Foundation Models (EFMs) provide a promising alternative by learning environmental representations from multi-modal satellite data. In this study, we evaluate the 64-dimensional AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) embeddings as a new form of static basin representation and assess their value for streamflow prediction under both in-sample (IS) and out-of-sample (OOS) settings using the CAMELS dataset. Results show that AEF embeddings offer higher OOS robustness than CAMELS attributes, despite nearly identical IS performance. Mutual-information analysis reveals statistical associations between AEF embeddings and conventional catchment attributes related to terrain, vegetation, and rooting characteristics. We further investigate similarity-based donor-basin selection for PUB using CAMELS attributes and AEF embeddings. Across 100 target basins, AEF static inputs generally improved PUB performance. With AEF inputs, similarity-based donor selection outperformed random selection for smaller donor pools, but its advantage diminished as pool size increased. Adding more donor basins did not consistently improve performance. Leave-one-cluster-out experiments showed AEF input benefits depended on basin partitioning, suggesting that transferability remains sensitive to the catchment conditions represented during training. Overall, this study demonstrates that Earth Foundation Model embeddings provide a transferable representation for PUB prediction and underscores the importance of basin representation quality and donor pool design, motivating future research toward unified hydrological foundation models.