HydroAgent: Closing the Gap Between Frontier LLMs and Human Experts in Hydrologic Model Calibration via Simulator-Grounded RL
Authors: Zhi Li, Songkun Yan, Jie Cao, Mofan Zhang, Anjiang Wei, Jinwoong Yoo, Yang Hong
Organizations: Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder · Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences, University of Oklahoma · Department of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma · Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University · Department of Computer Science, Stanford University · NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Calibrating distributed hydrologic models is a critical bottleneck across operational water resources management - streamflow prediction, reservoir operation, drought monitoring, infrastructure design, and flood forecasting all depend on it. Each basin demands an expert to translate hydrograph signatures into adjustments of a high-dimensional parameter vector, and the resulting workflow does not transfer between watersheds. We ask: can frontier large language model (LLM) agents replace the human hydrologic modeler, and if not, what would it take? We benchmark nine frontier LLM agents - Claude Opus 4.6/4.7, Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5/5.4/5.4-pro, and Gemini 2.5-pro/3.1-pro/3-flash - on the operational CREST distributed hydrologic model used by the U.S. National Weather Service for flash-flood forecasting. Best-of-twenty-rounds Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) across four held-out gauges spanning 329-40,792 km2 ranges from -0.16 (GPT-5.4) to 0.75 (Sonnet 4.6); the ceiling reproduces across all three vendors and capability tiers, with the strongest models concentrating in the 0.65-0.75 band, and no model reaches the human-expert reference except Opus-4.7 on one gauge. We argue this gap is not a parameter-count problem but a domain-grounding problem. We then propose HYDROAGENT, fine-tuning open-weight Qwen3-4B with supervised fine-tuning on 2,576 expert calibration trajectories and Group-Relative Policy Optimization using NSE as a verifiable reward from online CREST simulations - reinforcement learning with simulation feedback (RLSF). For Earth system science, a small domain-tuned policy with simulator-in-the-loop RL is a more compute-efficient and physically faithful path than scaling generic frontier models, and the multi-modal richness of Earth data - remote sensing, in-situ time series, and forecaster narrative - makes domain agents a leveraged direction for AI in physical science.
Operational flood forecasting depends on tacit forecaster expertise that is difficult to formalize, audit, and transfer. Although artificial intelligence methods have advanced flood prediction and model-error correction, most existing studies have not explicitly represented the tacit expert rules, review checkpoints, and workflow constraints that connect model outputs to operational warning decisions. To address this issue, we propose HydroAgent, a skill-orchestrated agent framework that embeds Large Language Models (LLMs) into a model-driven flood forecasting workflow, where each skill encodes explicit rules to bound LLM reasoning. We validated its effectiveness using five state-of-the-art LLMs in the South Yamhill River basin. Our results demonstrate that prior judgment captures observed peak flow and flood volume within 5% tolerance in 10 and 11 out of 14 events, with 5-fold cross-validation over 129 events yielding Pearson correlations of 0.62 and 0.84. Building on a high-baseline scheme library (average KGE 0.890), the guided scheme selection further improves KGE by 0.023-0.154, with simulated peak flow and flood volume falling within the prior judgment ranges for 14 and 13 out of 14 events. All five tested LLMs successfully execute the HydroAgent workflow with comparable judgment accuracy (40%-80%), while showing moderate performance variation and substantial cost differences. HydroAgent does not aim to replace human forecasters; instead, it translates their tacit expertise into an auditable and reproducible workflow, streamlining analytical steps and supporting more informed decision-making. This skill-orchestrated paradigm demonstrates how explicit rule boundaries can guide language model reasoning to complement physically based simulation in next-generation flood forecasting.
Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capability in sequential decision-making, yet they remains fundamentally reactive in long-horizon tasks. Unlike humans who employ "what-if" reasoning to evaluate potential plans before commitment, standard agents lack an internal world model to simulate future outcomes. Therefore, we propose to internalize future-aware planning by training a single autoregressive model to verbalize both a prospective state rollout and a plan-conditioned success estimate-a textual analogue of the Q-value. Crucially, we identify a format-capability gap: simply fine-tuning agents on look-ahead traces during post-training leads to superficial mimicry of foresight without genuine predictive grounding. To bridge this gap, we introduce a three-stage training paradigm: (i) World Model Agentic Mid-Training (WM-AMT) to inject latent predictive capabilities into the policy; (ii) Format-Eliciting SFT (FE-SFT) to structure this injected capability; and (iii) Foresight-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (FC-RL) to refine the calibration and utility of the generated simulations. Evaluated on search and mathematical reasoning tasks, our approach consistently outperforms other training baselines. Our results demonstrate that effective internal world modeling in LLM agents requires a capability-first training pipeline to achieve grounded and calibrated foresight.
A prevalent assumption in LLM agent deployment holds that more structured harnesses universally improve reliability, and that higher-capability models need proportionally less structural guidance -- together implying a monotone inverse relationship between model capability tier and optimal harness complexity. We test this hypothesis through a controlled 432-run experiment crossing six models across four capability tiers with three harness conditions (light, balanced, strict) on HEAT-24, a 24-task synthetic benchmark with git-based workspace verification. Our results refute the monotone inverse relationship on two fronts. First, for the frontier chat model evaluated (Gemini 2.5 Flash), increased harness verbosity lowers VTSR by 29-38 percentage points -- a harness-complexity paradox. Second, for the frontier reasoning model evaluated (Qwen3.5-122B, extended thinking enabled), strict harness achieves the highest VTSR (91.7%) and the lowest latency, the opposite of the prediction. Within the constrained tier, a 2B model (Gemma4:e2B) matches strong-open-tier stability at 91.7% across all harnesses. Because each tier is represented by a single model in this study, these results should be interpreted as model-specific observations; harness sensitivity appears non-monotone across the models evaluated, and depends critically on model type (chat vs. reasoning). We introduce a six-label failure taxonomy showing that format_violation dominates capable-model failures while wrong_file dominates low-capability failures, and we derive practical tier-aware harness selection guidelines.