Improved use of precipitation forecasts in short-term water forecasting – progress report

[摘要] This report presents an update on a prototype NWP verification system suited for hydrological applications. This system would eventually be used in real-time rainfall verification. It could also be used for retrospective case studies to investigate the use of NWP in hydrological applications. Two of the main challenges in creating case studies are the time consuming process of running all the NWP models up to resolutions which is high enough to be used in a catchment area, and building a verification system which is comprehensive enough to verify the model at these scales without losing the holistic view. RAINVAL, the operational daily rainfall verification system is used in conjunction with newly developed hourly verification features (e.g. using rain gauges for point verification and radar/gauge blends for spatial verification). Partial results for the first case study of 4 September 2010 are presented. The results indicated that higher resolution models gave a better indication of the location and intensity of high rainfall areas over the Victorian and Tasmanian regions than the global model, even at longer lead times. Early focus has been placed on the Ovens catchment in Victoria and the Richmond catchment in New South Wales, south of Brisbane. It is recommended that effort continue in these catchments because of their data availability and climatic diversity. More case studies are necessary for these regions to determine the reliability and skill of the models in different areas and to determine any systematic biases which might occur.

[发布日期] 2010-12-31 [发布机构] CAWCR

[学科分类] 地球科学(综合)