Towards Real‐Time Continental Scale Streamflow Simulation in Continuous and Discrete Space

Abstract

Abstract The National Weather Service ( NWS ) forecasts floods at approximately 3,600 locations across the United States (U.S.). However, the river network, as defined by the 1:100,000 scale National Hydrography Dataset‐Plus ( NHDP lus) dataset, consists of 2.7 million river segments. Through the National Flood Interoperability Experiment, a continental scale streamflow simulation and forecast system was implemented and continuously operated through the summer of 2015. This system leveraged the WRF ‐Hydro framework, initialized on a 3‐km grid, the Routing Application for the Parallel Computation of Discharge river routing model, operating on the NHDP lus, and real‐time atmospheric forcing to continuously forecast streamflow. Although this system produced forecasts, this paper presents a study of the three‐month nowcast to demonstrate the capacity to seamlessly predict reach scale streamflow at the continental scale. In addition, this paper evaluates the impact of reservoirs, through a case study in Texas. Validation of the uncalibrated model using observed hourly streamflow at 5,701 U.S. Geological Survey gages shows 26% demonstrate PB ias ≤ |25%|, 11% demonstrate Nash‐Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) ≥ 0.25, and 6% demonstrate both PB ias ≤ |25%| and NSE ≥ 0.25. When evaluating the impact of reservoirs, the analysis shows when reservoirs are included, NSE ≥ 0.25 for 56% of the gages downstream while NSE ≥ 0.25 for 11% when they are not. The results presented here provide a benchmark for the evolving hydrology program within the NWS and supports their efforts to develop a reach scale flood forecasting system for the country.