Using NOAA's New Climate Outlooks in Operational Hydrology

Abstract

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center recently began issuing new multiple long-lead outlooks of meteorological probabilities. Operational hydrology approaches for generating probabilistic hydrological outlooks must be compatible with these meteorological outlooks yet preserve spatial and temporal relationships observed in past meteorology. Many approaches, however, either limit the use of historical data to be compatible with meteorological outlooks or limit compatibility with the outlooks to allow fuller use of historical data. An operational hydrology approach that uses all historical data while remaining compatible with many of the new long-lead outlooks, in order of user priority, is described here. The approach builds a hypothetical very large structured set of possible future scenarios, to be treated as a “sample” from which to estimate outlook probabilities and other parameters. The use of this hypothetical set corresponds to the weighted use of a scenario set based on historical data. The determination of weights becomes an optimization problem for the general case. An example illustrates the concepts and method.