Radar rainfall nowcasting for flash flood forecasting

[Departement_IRSTEA]Eaux [TR1_IRSTEA]ARCEAU

Abstract. A simple two-dimensional rainfall model, based on advection and conservation of mass in a vertical cloud column, is investigated for use in short-term rainfall and flood forecasting at the catchment scale under UK conditions. The model is capable of assimilating weather radar, satellite infra-red and surface weather observations, together with forecasts from a mesoscale numerical weather prediction model, to obtain frequently updated forecasts of rainfall fields. Such data assimilation helps compensate for the simplified model dynamics and, taken together, provides a practical real-time forecasting scheme for catchment scale applications. Various ways are explored for using information from a numerical weather prediction model (16.8 km grid) within the higher resolution model (5 km grid). A number of model variants is considered, ranging from simple persistence and advection methods used as a baseline, to different forms of the dynamic rainfall model. Model performance is assessed using data from the Wardon Hill radar in Dorset for two convective events, on 10 June 1993 and 16 July 1995, when thunderstorms occurred over southern Britain. The results show that (i) a simple advection-type forecast may be improved upon by using multiscan radar data in place of data from the lowest scan, and (ii) advected, steady-state predictions from the dynamic model, using "inferred updraughts", provides the best performance overall. Updraught velocity is inferred at the forecast origin from the last two radar fields, using the mass-balance equation and associated data and is held constant over the forecast period. This inference model proves superior to the buoyancy parameterisation of updraught employed in the original formulation. A selection of the different rainfall forecasts is used as input to a catchment flow forecasting model, the IH PDM (Probability Distributed Moisture) model, to assess their effect on flow forecast accuracy for the 135 km2 Brue catchment in Somerset. Keywords: rainfall forecasting, flood forecasting, weather radar, satellite, storm model

An approach for improving the capability of a coupled meteorological and hydrological model for rainfall and flood forecasts

Flood early warning in fast responding catchments challenges our forecasting systems. It requires frequently updated, accurate and high-resolution rainfall forecasts to provide timely warning of rainfall amounts that will reach a catchment in the coming hours. The Netherlands is a typical example, with polder systems below sea level, a high level of urbanization and catchments with short response times. The need for better short-term rainfall forecasts is clearly present, but this is generally not feasible with numerical weather prediction (NWP) models alone. Hence, an alternative rainfall forecasting method is desirable for the first few hours into the future.Rainfall nowcasting can provide this alternative but quickly loses skill after the first few hours. A promising way forward is a seamless forecasting system, which tries to optimally combine rainfall products from nowcasting and NWP. In this study, we applied the STEPS blending method to combine rainfall forecasts from ensemble radar nowcasts with those from the Harmonie-AROME configuration of the ACCORD NWP model in the Netherlands. This blending method is part of the open-source nowcasting initiative pysteps. To make blending possible in an operational setup, including the needs of involved water authorities, we made several adjustments to the blending implementation in pysteps, for instance:We reduced the computational time by using a faster preprocessing and advection scheme. We improved the noise initialization (needed for generating ensemble members) to allow for stable forecasts, also when one or both product(s) contain(s) no rain. We enabled a dynamic disaggregation of the 1-hour resolution NWP forecasts to match the temporal resolution of the radar nowcast. We operationalized the updated blending framework in the flood forecasting platforms of the involved water authorities. Given a forecast duration of 12 hours for the blended forecast and a 10-minute time step, average computation times are 3.4 minutes for a deterministic run and 12.3 minutes for an ensemble forecast with 10 members on a 4-core machine. Preprocessing takes approximately 10 minutes and only needs to occur when a new NWP forecast is issued. We tested the implementation for an entire, rainy summer month (July 15 to August 15, 2023) and analyzed the results over the entire domain. The results demonstrate that the blending method effectively combines radar nowcasts with NWP forecasts. Depending on the statistical score considered (such as RMSE and critical success index), the blending method performs either better or on par with the best-performing individual product (radar nowcast or NWP). A consistent finding is that the blending closely tracks the nowcast quality during the initial 1 to 2 hours of the forecast (in this study, the nowcast had lower errors than NWP during the first 2 – 2.5 hours), after which it gradually transitions into the NWP forecast. At longer lead times, the seamless product retains local precipitation structures and extremes better than the NWP product. It does this by leveraging information from the radar nowcast and the stochastic perturbations. Based on these results, a seamless forecasting approach can be regarded as an improvement for the involved water authorities.

Floods are one of the most devastating natural hazards around the world, and flash floods are extremely dangerous to property and human lives. This study reviews the current flash flood forecasting in China and proposes a new methodology to develop a flash flood potential index (FFPI) based on GIS to further improve China's flash flood guidance system and national weather forecasting services. We collected datasets required to calculate the FFPI and tested a series of schemes to determine the method to calculate the FFPI over China. The result indicates that the calculated China's FFPI distribution can represent the risk of flash flood well, especially in Central and Southeast China. It is also implied that the southwest and western complex terrains are more susceptible to rain storms. Then we chose Yunnan Province as a test-bed and also yielded good results which can offer reference to the current China's flash flood forecasting system. Further research can be placed on incorporation of soil moisture and rainfall frequency components into the FFPI calculation method for dynamic warning and forecasting of flash floods.

Abstract. Beijiang catchment is a small catchment in southern China locating in the centre of the storm areas of the Pearl River Basin. Flash flooding in Beijiang catchment is a frequently observed disaster that caused direct damages to human beings and their properties. Flood forecasting is the most effective method for mitigating flash floods, the goal of this paper is to develop the flash flood forecasting model for Beijiang catchment. The catchment property data, including DEM, land cover types and soil types, which will be used for model construction and parameter determination, are downloaded from the website freely. Based on the Liuxihe Model, a physically based distributed hydrological model, a model for flash flood forecasting of Beijiang catchment is set up. The model derives the model parameters from the terrain properties, and further optimized with the observed flooding process, which improves the model performance. The model is validated with a few observed floods occurred in recent years, and the results show that the model is reliable and is promising for flash flood forecasting.

Flash floods occur frequently and distribute widely in mountainous areas because of complex geographic and geomorphic conditions and various climate types. Effective flash flood forecasting with useful lead times remains a challenge due to its high burstiness and short response time. Recently, machine learning has led to substantial changes across many areas of study. In hydrology, the advent of novel machine learning methods has started to encourage novel applications or substantially improve old ones. This study aims to establish a discharge forecasting model based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for flash flood forecasting in mountainous catchments. The proposed LSTM flood forecasting (LSTM-FF) model is composed of T multivariate single-step LSTM networks and takes spatial and temporal dynamics information of observed and forecast rainfall and early discharge as inputs. The case study in Anhe revealed that the proposed models can effectively predict flash floods, especially the qualified rates (the ratio of the number of qualified events to the total number of flood events) of large flood events are above 94.7% at 1–5 h lead time and range from 84.2% to 89.5% at 6–10 h lead-time. For the large flood simulation, the small flood events can help the LSTM-FF model to explore a better rainfall-runoff relationship. The impact analysis of weights in the LSTM network structures shows that the discharge input plays a more obvious role in the 1-h LSTM network and the effect decreases with the lead-time. Meanwhile, in the adjacent lead-time, the LSTM networks explored a similar relationship between input and output. The study provides a new approach for flash flood forecasting and the highly accurate forecast contributes to prepare for and mitigate disasters.

This article focuses on the forecasting of flash floods using the Algorithm of Storm Prediction as a new tool to predict convective precipitation, severe phenomena and the risk of flash floods. The first part of the article contains information on methods for predicting dangerous severe phenomena. This algorithm uses mainly data from numerical weather prediction models (NWP models), database of historic weather events and relief characteristics describing the influence of orography on the initiation of atmospheric convection. The result section includes verification of predicted algorithm outputs, selected NWP models and warnings of CHMI and ESTOFEX on three events related to the floods that hit the Zlín Region between years of 2015 - 2017. The main result is a report with prediction outputs of the algorithm visualized in maps for the territory of municipalities with extended competence and their regions. The outputs of the algorithm will be used primarily to increase the effectiveness of preventive measures against flash floods not only by the Fire Rescue Service of Czech Republic but also by the flood and crisis management authorities.

PREVIEW is an European Commission FP6 Integrated Project which aims at developing, on an European level, new geo-information services for natural and industrial risk management. The work package WP4340 focuses on forecast of Mediterranean flash floods. Phase 1 was devoted to the assessment of the usefulness of kilometric scale atmospheric model forecast for hydrological applications and to the development of hydro-meteorological coupled systems based on high-resolution atmospheric models and hydrological models able to reproduce the hydrological behaviour of Mediterranean catchments. Four high-resolution models at 2–3 km resolution have been run on five flash-flood cases over the French Cevennes-Vivarais and Italian Piedmont regions; models are MM5 (by NOA), COSMO-2 (by MeteoSwiss), MESO-NH (by Meteo-France) and COSMO-LAMI (by Arpa Piemonte). To investigate the benefit of coupling atmospheric and hydrological models, the quantitative precipitation forecasts (QPF) have been verified against observations using both classical and categorical statistical scores, while the sensitivity of the QPF to the model initial conditions has been also examined. In addition, the various hourly precipitation forecasts were supplied as input to hydrological models to evaluate through the simulated discharges the value of high resolution forecasts for hydrological forecast purposes. Clearly the hydrological verification conclusions differ from the QPF verification ones and show the usefulness of developing such hydrological verification as the one performed here.

Modeling a densely urbanized watershed with an artificial neural network, weather radar and telemetric data

Moisture boundaries, or drylines, are common over the southern U.S. high plains and are one of the most important airmass boundaries for convective initiation over this region. In favorable environments, drylines can initiate storms that produce strong and violent tornadoes, large hail, lightning, and heavy rainfall. Despite their importance, there are few studies documenting climatological dryline location and frequency, or performing systematic dryline forecast evaluation, which likely stems from difficulties in objectively identifying drylines over large datasets. Previous studies have employed tedious manual identification procedures. This study aims to streamline dryline identification by developing an automated, multiparameter algorithm, which applies image-processing and pattern recognition techniques to various meteorological fields and their gradients to identify drylines. The algorithm is applied to five years of high-resolution 24-h forecasts from Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model simulations valid April–June 2007–11. Manually identified dryline positions, which were available from a previous study using the same dataset, are used as truth to evaluate the algorithm performance. Generally, the algorithm performed very well. High probability of detection (POD) scores indicated that the majority of drylines were identified by the method. However, a relatively high false alarm ratio (FAR) was also found, indicating that a large number of nondryline features were also identified. Preliminary use of random forests (a machine learning technique) significantly decreased the FAR, while minimally impacting the POD. The algorithm lays the groundwork for applications including model evaluation and operational forecasting, and should enable efficient analysis of drylines from very large datasets.

Intense rainfall and flash flooding from landfalling tropical cyclones (LTC) can have devastating impacts on human life and property in coastal areas. The years 2017 and 2018 are examples of how the North Atlantic LTCs can create widespread destruction in the United States. Better preparedness is needed to mitigate the impact from the violent LTCs and can be achieved by improving the accuracy of forecasts and increased lead‐time of guidance products. However, predicting the fine‐scale details of rain bands in LTC is very challenging. This study attempts to elucidate the potential of National Severe Storms Laboratory's convective‐scale ensemble analysis and prediction system, known as the Warn‐on‐Forecast System (WoFS), in improving 0–6 hr probabilistic intense rainfall forecasts from three recent LTCs in the United States. Results indicate that the frequent 15 min assimilation cycling can accurately analyse the small‐scale details from the LTC rain bands in the WoFS analyses. The WoFS 0–6 hr ensemble forecasts initialized from those analyses represent the location, intensity and spatial distribution of intense rainfall (with the potential to cause flash flooding) as well as low‐level rotation with reasonably good accuracy. The continuous flow of the frequently updated WoFS rainfall guidance has the potential to aid operational forecasters in issuing watches, warnings, and short‐term forecast products of life‐threatening LTC with higher spatial and temporal specificity.

Flash floods account for a large proportion of flood-based fatalities, and they are becoming more frequent due to climate change. A global flash flood warning system therefore has the potential to be life saving.Standard approaches to flash flood forecasting – such as the Flash Flood Guidance (FFG) system in the US National Weather Service (NWS), or the European Runoff Index based on Climatology (ERIC) in the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) – are utilizing recent weather and soil conditions, physiographic characteristics of basins, and weather forecasts, in order to produce a forecast for possible flash floods. These forecasts are not disseminated directly to the public. Instead, they are firstly refined by hydrologists that have intimate knowledge of the relevant basins and of previous flood events. This introduces a difficulty to scaling these methods worldwide, as the training of professional hydrologists in every region is costly and time consuming.Recent applications of Machine Learning (ML) to hydrology show that a learning system has the potential to train on data-rich basins and generalize to data-poor basins, with a skill that is comparable to state of the art hydrological models. In this work we attempt to build a ML model to produce daily flash flood forecasts, based on globally available weather reanalysis and physiographic characteristics from HydroATLAS. We discuss the model architecture, and evaluate it against NWS Flash Flood Warnings (FFW). While such models may not surpass the skill of a professional hydrologist, they have the potential to provide reasonable warnings in regions that do not currently have any such system in place.

Quantifying uncertainty associated with flash flood warning or forecast systems is required to enable informed decision making by those responsible for operation and management of natural hazard protection systems. The current system used by the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) to issue flash-flood warnings and watches over the Unites States is a purely deterministic system. The authors propose a simple approach to augment the Flash Flood Guidance System (FFGS) with uncertainty propagation components. The authors briefly discuss the main components of the system, propose changes to improve it, and allow accounting for several sources of uncertainty. They illustrate their discussion with examples of uncertainty quantification procedures for several small basins of the Illinois River basin in Oklahoma. As the current FFGS is tightly coupled with two technologies, that is, threshold-runoff mapping and the Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting Hydrologic Model, the authors discuss both as sources of uncertainty. To quantify and propagate those sources of uncertainty throughout the system, they develop a simple version of the Sacramento model and use Monte Carlo simulation to study several uncertainty scenarios. The results point out the significance of the stream characteristics such as top width and the hydraulic depth on the overall uncertainty of the Flash Flood Guidance System. They also show that the overall flash flood guidance uncertainty is higher under drier initial soil moisture conditions. The results presented herein, although limited, are a necessary first step toward the development of probabilistic operational flash flood guidance forecast-response systems.

Rainfall forecasting, especially extreme rainfall forecasting, is one of crucial tasks in weather forecasting since it has direct impact on accompanying devastating events such as flash floods and fast-moving landslides. However, obtaining rainfall forecasts with high accuracy, especially for extreme rainfall occurrences, is a challenging task. This study focuses on developing a forecasting model which is capable of forecasting rainfall, including extreme rainfall values. The rainfall forecasting was achieved through sequence learning capability of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) method. The identification of the optimal set of features for the LSTM model was conducted using Random Forest and Granger Causality tests. Then, that best set of features was fed into Stacked LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM, and Encoder-Decoder LSTM models to obtain three days-ahead forecasts of rainfall with the input of the past fourteen days-values of selected features. Out of the three models, the best model was taken through post hoc residual analysis and extra validation approaches. This entire approach was illustrated utilizing rainfall and weather-related measurements obtained from the gauging station located in the city of Ratnapura, Sri Lanka. Originally, twenty-three features were collected including relative humidity, ssunshine hours, and mean sea level pressure. The performances of the three models were compared using RMSE. The Bidirectional LSTM model outperformed the other methods (RMSE < 5 mm and MAE < 3 mm) and this model has the capability to forecast extreme rainfall values with high accuracy.