1. Colorado Basin River Forecast Center and Drought Related Forecasts Kevin Werner

2. CBRFC drought related development projects: 1.Upper Colorado – Colorado above Kremmling (KRMC2) is a test basin for NIDIS. Discussion on: - Existing forecast services - Snow / Precipitation - Water Supply 2. Arizona – Testing distributed model. Focus on improving existing forecasts, enhancing flash flood program, and producing soil moisture grids. Outline

3. CBRFC Upper Colorado

4. Flood Forecasts / Routine Forecasts Nominally provided at ~400 points every 6 hours out to 10 days. Flexible web interface to forecasts and data Requires large amounts of data (e.g. snow, precip, streamflow)

5. Hydrograph forecasts

6. Snow

7. Precipitation Analysis Rigorous process to produce high quality estimates of precipitation Grids, basin average, points Hourly, 6 hourly, daily, monthly

8. Water Supply Forecasts Forecasts for spring runoff amounts from snow melt dominated basins in western US Routinely produced at 6 RFCs and coordinated with other agencies NWS forecast program began in 1940s Primary forecast tools: – Ensemble Streamflow Prediction (described earlier) – Multivariate Linear Regression

10. Forecast Evolution Time evolution of forecast and observed streamflow Plot options include: -Observed monthly or seasonal streamflow -Historical monthly or seasonal streamflow -Forecast seasonal streamflow -Accumulation options

11. Climate – Streamflow Relationship Scatterplot and statistics describe relationship between streamflow and climate variability Multiple Indices available (e.g. Nino3.4, MEI, PDO, etc) Plots customizable Statistics describing relationship (e.g. correlation, sample size, best fit line)

12. Ensemble Forecasts RFC Ensemble Forecasts -Initially offered at NWS water supply points -Display probability function for monthly volumes -Tools included to query historical data and forecast ensemble members -User customizable plots

13. Forecast Verification Easy to understand Meaningful Accessible from forecasts Dynamically generated plots from database Data Visualization Variety

14. Figure TS.5 (IPCC AR4, WG2). Illustrative map of future climate change impacts on freshwater which are a threat to the sustainable development of the affected regions. Climate Change: Fresh Water Projections “With a changing climate, water resources and how we manage them is going to become one of the most important issues we face in the coming years. It threatens to pit state against state and community against community so it is important that we take the issue very seriously at this early stage.” -VADM Lautenbacher, 8/1/08

15. Climate Change Scenarios

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17. Data Access Access to forecast and observed data from database

18. Link with Water Resources Outlook Link to OHRFC developed water resources outlook Predictor for USGS water watch

19. Arizona distributed modeling CBRFC generating soil moisture grids for Verde and Santa Cruz River basins. Data assimilation could improve model states to address inconsistencies in time and space.

20. CBRFC and NIDIS CBRFC ForecastsClimate and Weather Forecasts Hydro Models Research Decision Makers Value NIDIS