Developing a Hydrologic-Hydrodynamic Flood Forecasting System for Lake Champlain

In recent years, severe floods resulting from intense spring runoff and rain events caused significant destruction of property and infrastructure in the Lake Champlain Basin. Storm surge events led to even higher lake water levels and further damage. The objective of this project is to help citizens and water resource management agencies better anticipate and prepare for these events in the future by developing a real-time flood forecasting system for the Lake Champlain-Richelieu River basin. The modeling framework couples the National Water Model (NWM) configuration of the Weather Research and Forecasting-Hydrologic distributed model (WRF-Hydro) with a hydrodynamic model based on the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM).Wind waves in lake are predicted by the wave model based on the WAVEWATCH III model. Retrospective NWM simulations were conducted using meteorological forcings from North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS-2), AORC (Analysis of Record for Calibration), and Canadian Precipitation Analysis (CaPA) and HRRR (High Resolution Rapid Refresh) products in case of FVCOM. Model results are compared with observations at stream gages and water levels on seasonal and synoptic scales.