Abstract
•A hybrid method MC-GAN is proposed for hydrological modeling.•An improved DCGAN model is embedded into the Monte-Carlo simulation process.•Joint loss functions are used to improve the performance of MC-GAN.•Various hydrological patterns can be reproduced efficiently.•Multiple-scale realizations can be obtained by using the same trained model.
Characterization of complex subsurface structures is challenging due to the demand to preserve geological realism of the training images in earth and environmental sciences. In this work, we propose a novel method to reconstruct complex hydrological structures by using deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGAN) in the Monte-Carlo simulation process, named MC-GAN. Network architectures for reconstructing both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) complex spatial structures are provided in this method. We first exploit the robust DCGAN to reproduce abundant and various spatial pattern blocks. Then, we combine the various heterogeneous patterns to reconstruct a complex hydrological structure by using the Monte-Carlo stochastic simulation process. The method is able to represent multiple-scale spatial structures under the premise of using the same generative adversarial network architecture. It not only ensures the simulation efficiency, but also makes the heterogeneous patterns in the realizations more diverse. Three sets of training images were used to test the capability of the proposed method. The experiment results demonstrate that our method can accurately characterize complex heterogeneous spatial structures. At the same time, the trained deep learning model can be reused effectively to generate multiple-scale spatial structures.