The subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) predictive timescale, encompassing lead times ranging from 2 weeks to a season, is at the frontier of forecasting science. Forecasts on this timescale provide opportunities for enhanced application-focused capabilities to complement existing weather and climate services and products. There is, however, a ‘knowledge-value’ gap, where a lack of evidence and awareness of the potential socio-economic benefits of S2S forecasts limits their wider uptake. To address this gap, here we present the first global community effort at summarizing relevant applications of S2S forecasts to guide further decision-making and support the continued development of S2S forecasts and related services. Focusing on 12 sectoral case studies spanning public health, agriculture, water resource management, renewable energy and utilities, and emergency management and response, we draw on recent advancements to explore their application and utility. These case studies mark a significant step forward in moving from potential to actual S2S forecasting applications. We show that by placing user needs at the forefront of S2S forecast development – demonstrating both skill and utility across sectors – this dialogue can be used to help promote and accelerate the awareness, value and co-generation of S2S forecasts. We also highlight that while S2S forecasts are increasingly gaining interest among users, incorporating probabilistic S2S forecasts into existing decision-making operations is not trivial. Nevertheless, S2S forecasting represents a significant opportunity to generate useful, usable and actionable forecast applications for and with users that will increasingly unlock the potential of this forecasting timescale.
The effect of model calibration on the projection of climate change impact on hydrological indicators was assessed by employing variants of a pan-European hydrological model driven by forcing data from an ensemble of climate models. The hydrological model was calibrated using three approaches: calibration at the outlets of major river basins, regionalization through calibration of smaller scale catchments with unique catchment characteristics, and building a model ensemble by sampling model parameters from the regionalized model. The large-scale patterns of the change signals projected by all model variants were found to be similar for the different indicators. Catchment scale differences were observed between the projections of the model calibrated for the major river basins and the other two model variants. The distributions of the median change signals projected by the ensemble model were found to be similar to the distributions of the change signals projected by the regionalized model for all hydrological indicators. The study highlights that the spatial detail to which model calibration is performed can highly influence the catchment scale detail in the projection of climate change impact on hydrological indicators, with an absolute difference in the projections of the locally calibrated model and the model calibrated for the major river basins ranging between 0 and 55% for mean annual discharge, while it has little effect on the large-scale pattern of the projection.
Despite the potential of remote sensing for monitoring reservoir operation, few studies have investigated the extent to which reservoir releases can be inferred across different spatial and temporal scales. Through evaluating 21 reservoirs in the highly regulated Greater Mekong region, remote sensing imagery was found to be useful in estimating daily storage volumes for within‐year and over‐year reservoirs (correlation coefficients [CC] ≥ 0.9, normalized root mean squared error [NRMSE] ≤ 31%), but not for run‐of‐river reservoirs (CC < 0.4, 40% ≤ NRMSE ≤ 270%). Given a large gap in the number of reservoirs between global and local databases, the proposed framework can improve representation of existing reservoirs in the global reservoir database and thus human impacts in hydrological models. Adopting an Integrated Reservoir Operation Scheme within a multi‐basin model was found to overcome the limitations of remote sensing and improve streamflow prediction at ungauged cascade reservoir systems where previous modeling approaches were unsuccessful. As a result, daily regulated streamflow was predicted competently across all types of reservoirs (median values of CC = 0.65, NRMSE = 8%, and Kling‐Gupta efficiency [KGE] = 0.55) and downstream hydrological stations (median values of CC = 0.94, NRMSE = 8%, and KGE = 0.81). The findings are valuable for helping to understand the impacts of reservoirs and dams on streamflow and for developing more useful adaptation measures to extreme events in data sparse river basins.
Streamflow forecasting services driven by seasonal meteorological forecasts from dynamic prediction systems deliver valuable information for decision-making in the water sector. Moving beyond the traditional river basin boundaries, large-scale hydrological models enable a coordinated, efficient, and harmonized anticipation and management of water-related risks (droughts, floods). However, the use of forecasts from such models at the river basin scale remains a challenge, depending on how the model reproduces the hydrological features of each particular river basin. Consequently, post-processing of forecasts is a crucial step to ensure usefulness at the river basin scale. In this paper we present a methodology to post-process seasonal streamflow forecasts from large-scale hydrological models and advance their quality for local applications. It consists of fuzzy logic systems that bias-adjust seasonal forecasts from a large-scale hydrological model by comparing its modeled streamflows with local observations. The methodology is demonstrated using forecasts from the pan-European hydrological model E-HYPE at the Jucar River Basin (Spain). Fuzzy post-processed forecasts are compared to post-processed forecasts derived from a quantile mapping approach as a benchmark. Fuzzy post-processing was able to provide skillful streamflow forecasts for the Jucar river basin keeping most of the skill of raw E-HYPE forecasts, and also outperforming quantile mapping based forecasts. The proposed methodology offers an efficient one-to-one mapping between large-scale modeled streamflows and basin-scale observations preserving its temporal dependence structure, and can adapt its input set to increase the skill of post-processed forecasts.
In a context that fosters the evolution of hydro-climate services, it is crucial to support and train users in making the best possible forecast-based decisions. Here, we analyze how decision-making is influenced by the seasonal forecast performance based on the Call For Water serious game in which participants manage a water supply reservoir. The aim is twofold: (1) train participants in the concepts of forecast sharpness and reliability, and (2) collect participants’ decisions to investigate the levels of forecast sharpness and reliability needed to make informed decisions. In the first game round, participants are provided with forecasts of varying reliability and sharpness, while in the second round, they have the possibility to pay for systematically reliable and sharp forecasts (improved forecasts). Exploitable answers were collected from 367 participants, predominantly researchers, forecasters and consultants in the water resources and energy sectors. Results show that improved forecasts led to better decisions, enabling participants to step out of purely conservative strategies and successfully take risks. Reliability levels of 60% are necessary for decision-making while both reliability levels above 70% and sharpness are required for informed risk-prone strategies. Improved forecasts are judged more valuable in extreme years, for instance when hedging against water shortage risks. Additionally, participants working in the energy, air quality and agriculture sectors, as well as traders, decision-makers and forecasters invested the most in forecasts. Finally, we discuss the potential of serious games to foster capacity development in hydro-climate services, and provide recommendations for forecast-based service development.
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