Estimating and Communicating Hydrologic Ensembles in
the Mid Atlantic (323)
Robert Shedd, NOAA/NWS/Middle
Atlantic River Forecast Center, State
College, PA
Rachel Hogan Carr, Nurture
Nature Center
Burrell Montz Covey, East
Carolina University
Abstract:
The Middle Atlantic River
Forecast Center (MARFC) has begun widespread implementation of the national
Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service (HEFS) across the Mid-Atlantic US. HEFS is
a software suite to provide ensemble river forecasts with forecast durations from
a few days out to weeks, months, and even a year into the future. Initial
implementations of HEFS utilize the GEFS (Global Ensemble Forecast System) and
the CFSv2 (Climate Forecast System) for precipitation and temperature forcings
and use various procedures to minimize bias to forcings errors as well as
hydrologic model errors.This presentation will discuss two aspects of MARFC's
implementation of HEFS. The first piece will address what HEFS is and how it is
being implemented specifically in the Mid-Atlantic. We will look at some case
studies and hindcast validation results that have been performed prior to
implementation. We will also address some of the implementation challenges
specifically associated with reservoir modeling with long term ensembles.The
second phase of the presentation will present a social science study that has
been led by Nurture Nature Center and East Carolina University. This study
looked at how we can be improving some of the HEFS product suite in order to
make the probabilistic information contained in the products more
understandable to a broad variety of users, including the public, emergency
managers, and water resources managers.