Progress Toward Operational, Distributed, and Physically-Based Snow Modeling to Support Water Supply and Streamflow Forecasts at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center
Abstract
The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center is developing an operational framework to run a spatially distributed, physically-based snow model with the goal of improving the 10 day streamflow and seasonal water supply forecast products. In cooperation with the University of Utah Snow Hydro Laboratory and the Agricultural Research Service's Northwest Watershed Research Center, the Automated Water Supply Model (AWSM) has been implemented in test basins within the Colorado River Basin, USA. Currently, AWSM is configured to force the iSnobal snow accumulation and melt model with downscaled High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) numerical weather prediction model data. One advantage of spatially distributed snow modeling (over lumped modeling) is that remotely sensed snow cover products can be used to update model state and forcing variables, and to validate results on a finer spatial resolution.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.H22O1013K