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Author: Marie-Amélie Boucher

“One thing you need to know about seasonal forecasts”

“One thing you need to know about seasonal forecasts”

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Contributed by Rachel Bazile, Marie-Amélie Boucher and Chris White. “It is that they have no skill…” This is how Matt Newman from NOAA’s ESRL referred to seasonal forecasts in his opening presentation at the Second International Conference on Subseasonal to Seasonal (S2S) / Seasonal to Decadal (S2D) Prediction. Organized by NCAR, the meeting which was held from Sept. 17 to 21 in Boulder, Colorado, had gathered more than 300 international scientists from both the S2S and S2D prediction communities… but…

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Risk aversion and decision making using ensemble forecasts

Risk aversion and decision making using ensemble forecasts

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by Marie-Amélie Boucher and Vincent Boucher Assessing the value of forecasts is a very popular topic among the HEPEX community. The assessment of forecast value is highly dependent on the purpose served by the forecasts. For the specific problem of decision-making related to flood mitigation, Murphy (1976, 1977) proposed the use of the cost-loss ratio framework. The vast majority of papers related to the assessment of forecast value for flood mitigation adopt this framework, so one could think that everything is…

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Pre-, post-processing or both?

Pre-, post-processing or both?

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by Marie-Amélie Boucher, a HEPEX 2015 Guest Columnist Do you think it is better to pre-process the meteorological forecasts, to post-process the hydrological forecasts or to do both? Why? Following this blog about future directions for post-processing research, this challenge was mentioned in a comment by James Brown: « Putting aside the choice of technique, I think there are some more fundamental questions about how to use hydrologic post-processing operationally. For example, under what circumstances does it make sense to separate between…

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Analogues are the new deterministic forecasts

Analogues are the new deterministic forecasts

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by Marie-Amélie Boucher, a HEPEX 2015 Guest Columnist According to Krzysztofowicz (2001), “Probabilistic forecasts are scientifically more honest [than deterministic forecasts], enable risk-based warnings of floods, enable rational decision making, and offer additional economic benefits.” More than 10 years later, I think most people (and especially members of the HEPEX community!) agree with this statement. But what about different types of probabilistic/ensemble forecasts? How do they compare to one another? In the literature, it is very frequent to use deterministic forecasts…

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The human hydrological model

The human hydrological model

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by Marie-Amélie Boucher, a HEPEX 2015 Guest Columnist Very recently, my fellow HEPEX columnist Jan Danhelka discussed the importance of the human forecasters in the whole process of weather and streamflow forecasting. His blog reminded me of a visit I made last year which somewhat challenged my views on flood forecasting. It was a technical tour about water management on Spencer Creek watershed that took place at the end of a conference. And there I met the first (and so far…

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