Research and Development Office

Development of an Ensemble National-Domain Dataset of Gridded Meteorological Fields (UCAR NCAR, Clark)

Project ID: 1620
Principal Investigator: Kenneth Nowak
Research Topic: Water Operation Models and Decision Support Systems
Funded Fiscal Years: 2016 and 2017
Keywords: None

Research Question

How can we make optimal use of the available station data, remotely sensed data, and atmospheric model reanalyses, to produce statistically reliable ensemble spatial meteorological fields across the USA?

Need and Benefit

Gridded precipitation and temperature products are used in a variety of water management and planning applications, including assessment of long-term conditions under climate change, evaluation of short-term conditions relevant to reservoir operations, and estimation of event-scale possibilities relevant to infrastructure safety assessments. Such products are inherently uncertain because of myriad factors, including interpolation from a sparse observation network, measurement representativeness, and measurement errors. Generally uncertainty is not explicitly accounted for in gridded products of precipitation or temperature; if it is represented, it is often included in an ad hoc manner. A lack of quantitative uncertainty estimates for hydrometeorological forcing fields limits the application of advanced data assimilation systems and other tools in land surface and hydrologic modeling.

Contributing Partners

Contact the Principal Investigator for information about partners.

Research Products

Bureau of Reclamation Review

The following documents were reviewed by experts in fields relating to this project's study and findings. The results were determined to be achieved using valid means.

New Tools and Datasets for Understanding Observational Uncertainty (final, PDF, 878KB)
By Kenneth Nowak
Publication completed on September 30, 2016

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