Abstract
Abstract. Meteorological and hydrological centres around the world are looking at ways to improve their capacity to be able to produce and deliver skilful and reliable forecasts of high-impact extreme rainfall and flooding events on a range of prediction timescales (e.g. sub-daily, daily, multi-week, seasonal). Making improvements to extended-range rainfall and flood forecast models, assessing forecast skill and uncertainty, and exploring how to apply flood forecasts and communicate their benefits to decision-makers are significant challenges facing the forecasting and water resources management communities. This paper presents some of the latest science and initiatives from Australia on the development, application and communication of extreme rainfall and flood forecasts on the extended-range "subseasonal-to-seasonal" (S2S) forecasting timescale, with a focus on risk-based decision-making, increasing flood risk awareness and preparedness, capturing uncertainty, understanding human responses to flood forecasts and warnings, and the growing adoption of "climate services". The paper also demonstrates how forecasts of flood events across a range of prediction timescales could be beneficial to a range of sectors and society, most notably for disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities, emergency management and response, and strengthening community resilience. Extended-range S2S extreme flood forecasts, if presented as easily accessible, timely and relevant information are a valuable resource to help society better prepare for, and subsequently cope with, extreme flood events.
Highlights
Riverine flooding following heavy rainfall events is the most common form of flooding in Australia
This paper presents the possibility of utilising S2S predictions for seamless “weather-to-climate” flood forecasting (Sect. 2) and provides information on the challenges on using and communicating flood forecasts on S2S timescales
Hudson et al (2011) found that the forecast skill of rainfall on intraseasonal timescales was found to be increased during strong phases of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), indicating that these slow variations of boundary forcing should be considered a source of intraseasonal climate predictability
Summary
Riverine flooding following heavy rainfall events is the most common form of flooding in Australia. There is, a significant predictive gap in between the current short- to medium-range NWP weather forecasts and warnings (including the THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE) project for NWP forecasts; see: http://tigge.ecmwf.int/) and the statistical/dynamical seasonal streamflow and rainfall outlooks, which has largely yet to be explored for its potential for improving flood forecasts. This timescale is referred to the subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) or “intra-seasonal” forecasting timescale and is generally regarded as an extended-range 15- to 30-day (i.e. weeks 3 to 4) forecast lead time (Robertson et al, 2014). The WWRP-WCRP S2S project dataset will provide a highly valuable repository for the applications communities to be able to evaluate the potential benefit of multi-model prediction of rainfall (and other variables) on the S2S timescale and its usability for important societal applications such as flood forecasting
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