Even though there exist many research efforts trying to develop forecasting models based on machine learning (ML) or statistical techniques, feature selection is not employed in a large majority of the studies. To fill this gap, this study builds prediction models involving feature selection through one-step ahead estimation of climatological parameters (i.e., temperature and evapotranspiration), considering the aforementioned shortcomings. In addition, the best models are used to make estimations for a long horizon of 30 years. The experimental results performed on three stations located at the Van Lake Closed basin of Turkey showed that the Bayesian Ridge regressor (BRR) often outperforms other regressors. The respective best models involving BRR also enabled us to obtain