ensemble techniques – Page 2

“Are we talking just a bit of water out of bank? Or is it Armageddon?” Front line perspectives on transitioning to probabilistic fluvial flood forecasts in England

September 16, 2020 Rebecca Emerton Comments 2 comments

Contributed by Louise Arnal, Jess Neumann, Liz Stephens and Hannah Cloke This blog post is based on a paper recently published in Geoscience Communication, written in collaboration with Liz Anspoks, Sue Manson, Tim Norton and Louise Wolfenden from the Environment Agency. With the aim to better anticipate future floods, UK policy is seeing an ongoing shift from flood defence towards a forecast-based flood risk management approach, under the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. It is in this context that…

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New water modelling to improve irrigation outlook accuracy

August 12, 2020 Rebecca Emerton Comments 0 Comment

Contributed by Yating Tang1, Catherine Norwood2, Q J Wang1, Guy Ortlipp3, Mark Bailey3, and Kirsti Hakala1. Goulburn-Murray Water (GMW), Australia’s largest rural water corporation, has teamed up with researchers from the University of Melbourne to improve water forecasting in northern Victoria, to help irrigators with their business planning, cropping and water trading decisions. GMW is responsible for providing water availability information to local irrigators and other water users during the irrigation season each year. GMW provides two types of information…

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How many zeros is too many for reliable streamflow predictions?

July 16, 2020 Rebecca Emerton Comments 2 comments

Contributed by Mark Thyer, David McInerney and Dmitri Kavetski, University of Adelaide. Ephemeral catchments, where there are days with zero flow, are common in many parts of the world, particular in areas with highly variable climate such as Australia (see Figure 1). Recent research has established how the number of days with zero flow impacts the reliability of probabilistic streamflow predictions in ephemeral catchments (McInerney et al., 2019). When there exists days with zero flow, producing reliable probabilistic predictions is…

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Assimilation of in-situ and satellite data in hydrological predictions – Can we add value?

June 3, 2020 Rebecca Emerton Comments 0 Comment

Contributed by Jude Musuuza (SMHI). The increased focus on satellite missions in recent years has resulted in a rich source of valuable Earth Observations (EO), in terms of spatial coverage and temporal frequencies that are impossible to achieve with direct measurements. Such observations have been used in various disciplines, including also hydrological modelling, for instance to improve process understanding through tailored model parameterisation and performance assessment. In addition EOs have been used to (better) initialise the model states which further…

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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…

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