High-Resolution Hydrologic Forecasting for Very Large Urban Areas
Abstract
With continuing growth of urban population worldwide, high-resolution hydrologic forecasting is an increasingly important need for large urban areas. In the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area, the CASA WX program has been providing real-time hydrologic products at 1 min-500 m resolution using the NWS Research Hydrologic Distributed Model forced by the quantitative precipitation estimates from a network of X-band weather radars. There is an increasing demand, however, for even higher-spatial resolution hydrologic products. In this presentation, we assess the ability of the current streamflow product to capture the hydrologic response of urban catchments in the DFW area, the utility of ultrasonic distance sensors for wireless sensing of water level in urban streams, and the feasibility of higher-resolution operation using parallel processing and cloud computing. We show that the CASA WX streamflow product skillfully captures the stage and streamflow response from rainfall for the majority of the 9 catchments studied, but that timing errors significantly deteriorate the quality of streamflow prediction for certain basins. Comparative evaluation of different computing models shows that a reduction in runtime of up to 34 percent is possible with parallel processing at 1 min-250 m resolution. High-quality sensing of water level or flow in urban streams remains a significant gap toward improving high-resolution modeling and prediction in the built environment.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H53F..02S
- Keywords:
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- 1821 Floods;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1834 Human impacts;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1840 Hydrometeorology;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGY