Use of Next Generation Weather Radar Data and Basin Disaggregation to Improve Continuous Hydrograph Simulations

Abstract

Currently, the river forecasting system deployed in each of 13 River Forecast Centers of the National Weather Service primarily uses lumped parameter models to generate hydrologic simulations. With the deployment of the weather surveillance radar 1988 Doppler radars, more and more precipitation data with high spatial and temporal resolution have become available for hydrologic modeling. Hydrologists inside and outside the National Weather Service are now investigating how to effectively use these data to enhance river-forecasting capabilities. In this paper, six years of continuously simulated hydrographs from an eight-subbasin model are compared to those from a single-basin (or lumped) model, both applied to the Blue River basin (1,232 km