Journal
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION
Volume 54, Issue 1, Pages 7-27Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1752-1688.12586
Keywords
continental scale river dynamics; streamflow prediction; surface water hydrology; flood forecasting
Funding
- National Science Foundation through the National Weather Service and Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- California Institute of Technology
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- National Center for Atmospheric Research
- Texas Advanced Computing Center
- ESRI
- Microsoft Research
- Kisters
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts floods at approximately 3,600 locations across the United States (U.S.). However, the river network, as defined by the 1:100,000 scale National Hydrography Dataset-Plus (NHDPlus) dataset, consists of 2.7 million river segments. Through the National Flood Interoperability Experiment, a continental scale streamflow simulation and forecast system was implemented and continuously operated through the summer of 2015. This system leveraged the WRF-Hydro framework, initialized on a 3-km grid, the Routing Application for the Parallel Computation of Discharge river routing model, operating on the NHDPlus, and real-time atmospheric forcing to continuously forecast streamflow. Although this system produced forecasts, this paper presents a study of the three-month nowcast to demonstrate the capacity to seamlessly predict reach scale streamflow at the continental scale. In addition, this paper evaluates the impact of reservoirs, through a case study in Texas. Validation of the uncalibrated model using observed hourly streamflow at 5,701 U.S. Geological Survey gages shows 26% demonstrate PBias|25%|, 11% demonstrate Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE)0.25, and 6% demonstrate both PBias|25%| and NSE0.25. When evaluating the impact of reservoirs, the analysis shows when reservoirs are included, NSE0.25 for 56% of the gages downstream while NSE0.25 for 11% when they are not. The results presented here provide a benchmark for the evolving hydrology program within the NWS and supports their efforts to develop a reach scale flood forecasting system for the country.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available