data systems – HEPEX

Climate services help improve decision-making for weather-dependent industries

May 13, 2020 Rebecca Emerton Comments 0 Comment

Contributed by Ilias Pechlivanidis, SMHI, & HEPEX co-chair. Many industries are in need of reliable and usable climate forecasts for the coming weeks and months. Such predictions can help energy companies and other weather-dependent sectors better manage climate-related risks. Renewable energy – such as wind, solar and hydropower – is the fastest growing source of electricity globally. Renewable energy comes from natural sources such as sunlight, wind, or rain, which are not continuously generated. The generation of renewable energy is…

Read More Read More

Data Drought and Data Flood

July 17, 2019 Rebecca Emerton Comments 0 Comment

Contributed by Mark Trigg*. It’s hot, and very, very dry. The rains have failed, and the animals are dying. Around the table people are concerned that it will be people dying next. The cycle seems to repeat every 10 years and the response is exactly the same, every time – we must do something and save lives. “Drill more boreholes and put in big pumps and generators”, someone cries, “no matter the cost!”. A timid voice rises above the ongoing…

Read More Read More

OpenIFS@home: Using citizen science to improve our understanding of weather and hydrological forecasts

June 19, 2019 Florian Pappenberger Comments 0 Comment

The history of HEPEX is deeply connected to ensemble forecasting and uncertainty analysis. Indeed, none of us could even imagine a forecast without uncertainties (apart from McFool). One direction of research is to investigate the value in improving forecasts using a coupled system and truly understand the interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface whilst analysing the associated uncertainties. However, any analysis is limited by the resources one has available. To run a large number of ensembles, one would…

Read More Read More

How writing an article can come out of the blue (KGE on log-transformed flows: a bad idea?)

November 7, 2018 Maria-Helena Ramos Comments 6 comments

Contributed by Léonard Santos (Irstea, France). It is common to read articles in which the Kling and Gupta Efficiency (KGE, Gupta et al., 2009) or its modified version (KGE’, Kling et al., 2012) are used as a metric to evaluate the quality of streamflow simulations. They are often seen as a solution to substitute the Nash and Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE, Nash and Sutcliffe, 1970). However, are these two criterion totally comparable? Can the KGE be used exactly in the same…

Read More Read More

Flood memory and historical marks of high waters

January 10, 2017 Maria-Helena Ramos Comments 0 Comment

Contributed by Maria-Helena Ramos (Irstea, France) Last year, the Hepex Portal published a blog post by Richard Davies from floodlist.com about the UK and Ireland floods in December 2015 and January 2016. When navigating through the floodlist website, I found a page dedicated to flood and high water marks (here). I have always found these marks indicating the level reached by the waters of a river (or any other waterbody) after a flood event to be fascinating. It is not…

Read More Read More