Assessing the Skill of Medium-Range Ensemble Precipitation and Streamflow Forecasts from the Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service (HEFS) for the Upper Trinity River Basin in North Texas

Abstract

Abstract To issue early warnings for the public to act, for emergency managers to take preventive actions, and for water managers to operate their systems cost-effectively, it is necessary to maximize the time horizon over which streamflow forecasts are skillful. In this work, we assess the value of medium-range ensemble precipitation forecasts generated with the Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service (HEFS) of the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) in increasing the lead time and skill of streamflow forecasts for five headwater basins in the upper Trinity River basin in north-central Texas. The HEFS uses ensemble mean precipitation forecasts from the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) of the National Centers for Environment Prediction (NCEP). For comparative evaluation, we verify ensemble streamflow forecasts generated with the HEFS forced by the GEFS forecast with those forced by the short-range quantitative precipitation forecasts (QPFs) from the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center (WGRFC) based on guidance from the NCEP’s Weather Prediction Center. We also assess the benefits of postprocessing the raw ensemble streamflow forecasts and evaluate the impact of selected parameters within the HEFS on forecast quality. The results show that the use of medium-range precipitation forecasts from the GEFS with the HEFS extends the time horizon for skillful forecasting of mean daily streamflow by 1–3 days for significant events when compared with using only the 72-h River Forecast Center (RFC) QPF with the HEFS. The HEFS forced by the GEFS also improves the skill of two-week-ahead biweekly streamflow forecast by about 20% over climatological forecast for the largest 1% of the observed biweekly flow.