Hydrologic Operational Evaluation Reporting System for the National Water Model

A routine monitoring and evaluation of the hydrologic forecasts produced by the National Weather Service (NWS) Regional Forecast Centers (RFC) including those produced by the National Water Model (NWM) is needed to efficiently assess performance, report on progress, and identify areas for improvement. An evaluation reporting function, coined the Routine Hydrologic Operational Evaluation Reporting (RHOER) has been developed at the Office of Water Prediction (OWP), NWS for this purpose.

The RHOER uses the Routine Operational Evaluation (ROE) application developed by the Water Resources Evaluation Service (WRES) to produce a report or equivalently a briefing function, for presentation of a selected set of evaluation results of the performance of NWM and RFC streamflow forecasts by identifying changes in statistical metrics and direct comparison to observations at selected USGS gauge locations.

Two main reporting vehicles were developed:

- A highly interactive version of the report configured for use by customers, such as the Water Prediction Operations Division (WPOD) at the OWP , who would require a wide variety of performance data across a large range of temporal and spatial scales. The platform for this report is a stand alone version of Delft-FEWS.

- An interactive story map journal suitable for daily briefing. The platform for this report is an ESRI story map. This reporting would highlight areas of agreement and disagreement between the forecasts and observations and would include the ability to select, zoom and interrogate.

This presentation would describe the use of Delft-FEWS and ESRI Story Map for producing the routine evaluation reports and its application.