Prospects for seasonal forecasting of summer drought and low river flow anomalies in England and Wales

Wedgbrow, C. S.; Wilby, Robert L.; Fox, H. R.; O’Hare, Greg

doi:10.1002/joc.735

Cited by 98 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 46 publications

(43 reference statements)

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“…However, they flag up areas and seasons for which forecasts have been successful or less successful. For example, Wedgbrow et al (2002) investigated correlations between winter atmospheric and oceanic indices on the one hand, and summer and autumn monthly river flows for catchments in England and Wales, on the other. They found higher correlations for the summer months (particularly August, |r| < 0.51) than the autumn months.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the United Kingdom (UK), the development of seasonal river flow forecasting methods has previously been limited to either a few catchments, and/or covered mainly the summer season (e.g. Wilby 2001, Wedgbrow et al 2002, Wilby et al 2004, Svensson and Prudhomme 2005. These methods are all based on empirical relationships between hydrological indicators and climate indices in the preceding months, and are therefore not easily transferrable to other locations and seasons.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Seasonal river flow forecasts for the United Kingdom using persistence and historical analogues

Svensson

2015

Hydrological Sciences Journal

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Seasonal river flow forecasting methods are currently being developed for country-wide application in the United Kingdom, using several different techniques. In this paper, methods based on persistence and historical flow analogues are presented. New 1-and 3-month forecasts are made each month using monthly river flows at 93 stations with records at least 30 years long. The method that performs best is selected for each separate month, catchment and forecast duration. The forecasts based on persistence of the previous month's flow generally outperform the analogues approach, particularly for slowly responding catchments (mainly in the southeast) with large underground water storage in aquifers. Historical analogues make a useful contribution to the forecasts in the northwest of the country. Correlations between hindcasts and observations that exceed 0.23 and are significant at the 5% level for a one-sided test are found for 81% (70%) of the station-month combinations for the 1-month (3-month) forecast. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seasonal river flow forecasts for the United Kingdom using persistence and historical analogues

Svensson

2015

Hydrological Sciences Journal

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“…MacLachlan et al, 2015;Athanasiadis et al, 2014), allowing for some form of skilful dynamical hydrological forecast. As well as using a climate model output, others are investigating statistical relationships between large-scale North Atlantic climate indices (such as the North Atlantic Oscillation, NAO) and seasonal rainfall or river flow anomalies (Lavers et al, 2010a, b;McGregor and Phillips, 2004;Svensson and Prudhomme, 2005;Wedgbrow et al, 2002;Wilby, 2001;Svensson et al, 2015), and these can provide increased skill when large-scale patterns dominate regional rainfall .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A national-scale seasonal hydrological forecast system: development and evaluation over Britain

Bell

Davies

Kay

et al. 2017

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Skilful winter seasonal predictions for the North Atlantic circulation and northern Europe have now been demonstrated and the potential for seasonal hydrological forecasting in the UK is now being explored. One of the techniques being used combines seasonal rainfall forecasts provided by operational weather forecast systems with hydrological modelling tools to provide estimates of seasonal mean river flows up to a few months ahead.The work presented here shows how spatial information contained in a distributed hydrological model typically requiring high-resolution (daily or better) rainfall data can be used to provide an initial condition for a much simpler forecast model tailored to use low-resolution monthly rainfall forecasts. Rainfall forecasts ("hindcasts") from the GloSea5 model (1996 to 2009) are used to provide the first assessment of skill in these national-scale flow forecasts. The skill in the combined modelling system is assessed for different seasons and regions of Britain, and compared to what might be achieved using other approaches such as use of an ensemble of historical rainfall in a hydrological model, or a simple flow persistence forecast. The analysis indicates that only limited forecast skill is achievable for Spring and Summer seasonal hydrological forecasts; however, Autumn and Winter flows can be reasonably well forecast using (ensemble mean) rainfall forecasts based on either GloSea5 forecasts or historical rainfall (the preferred type of forecast depends on the region). Flow forecasts using ensemble mean GloSea5 rainfall perform most consistently well across Britain, and provide the most skilful forecasts overall at the 3-month lead time. Much of the skill (64 %) in the 1-month ahead seasonal flow forecasts can be attributed to the hydrological initial condition (particularly in regions with a significant groundwater contribution to flows), whereas for the 3-month ahead lead time, GloSea5 forecasts account for ∼ 70 % of the forecast skill (mostly in areas of high rainfall to the north and west) and only 30 % of the skill arises from hydrological memory (typically groundwater-dominated areas). Given the high spatial heterogeneity in typical patterns of UK rainfall and evaporation, future development of skilful spatially distributed seasonal forecasts could lead to substantial improvements in seasonal flow forecast capability, potentially benefitting practitioners interested in predicting hydrological extremes, not only in the UK but also across Europe.

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“…Fowler and Kilsby (2002a) found a positive correlation between the NAO and the precipitation quantities in the west of the UK and a negative correlation in the east. However, the relationship does not seem to be that simple, with Wedgbrow (2002) finding a lag between the changing NAO index and the change in UK weather. This was hypothesised to be caused by either climatological memory effects, such as seasonal patterns, or hydrological memory effects, for example groundwater levels or antecedent moisture levels.…”

Section: Ase As Asw Aw Anw) and Unclassifiable (U) Jones Et Almentioning

confidence: 96%

Rural land management impacts on catchment scale flood risk

Pattison¹

2010

Role of Hydrology in Managing Consequences of a Changing Global Environment

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source• a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses• the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Most approaches to this problem aim to upscale from individual grid cells to whole catchments, something that restricts the complexity of possible process representation, produces models that may not be parsimonious with the data needed to calibrate them and, faced with data uncertainties, provides computational limitations on the extent to which model uncertainty can be fully explored. Rather than upscaling to problems of concern, this thesis seeks to downscale from locations of known flood risk, as a means of identifying where land use management changes might be beneficial and then uses numerical modelling to identify the kinds of management changes required in those downscaled locations. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to test an approach to understanding the impacts of rural land management upon flood risk based upon catchment-to-source downscaling.This thesis uses the case study of the River Eden catchment (2400 km 2 ) as a test (1) it was shown to have a significant impact on downstream flood risk; and (2) it had range of data and information needed for modelling land use changes.The second part of this thesis explored the land management scenarios that could be used to reduce flood risk at the catchment scale. The scenarios to be tested were determined through a stakeholder participation approach, whereby workshops were held to brainstorm and prioritise land management options, and then to identify specific locations within the Eamont sub-catchment where they could tested. There were two main types of land management scenarios chosen: (1) landscape-scale changes, including afforestation and compaction; and (2) corresponding to a 5.8% decrease in peak discharge. A key conclusion is that land management practices have been shown to have an effect on catchment scale flooding, even for extreme flood events. However, the effect of land management scenarios are both spatially and temporally dependent i.e. the same land management practice has different effects depending on where it is implemented, and when implemented in the same location has different effects on different flood events.

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Prospects for seasonal forecasting of summer drought and low river flow anomalies in England and Wales

Cited by 98 publications

References 46 publications

Seasonal river flow forecasts for the United Kingdom using persistence and historical analogues

Seasonal river flow forecasts for the United Kingdom using persistence and historical analogues

A national-scale seasonal hydrological forecast system: development and evaluation over Britain

Rural land management impacts on catchment scale flood risk

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