Can Continental Models Convey Useful Seasonal Hydrologic Information at the Catchment Scale?

Climatic variations can have a significant impact on a number of water-related sectors. Managing such variations through accurate predictions is thus crucial. Continental hydro-climate services have recently received attention to address various user needs. However, predictions for months ahead can be limited at catchment scale, highlighting the need for data tailoring. Here, we address how seasonal forecasts from continental services can be used to address user needs at the catchment scale. We compare a continentally-calibrated process-based model (E-HYPE) and a catchment-specific parsimonious model (GR6J) to forecast streamflow in a set of French catchments.This work provides insights into UPH 20 (How can we disentangle and reduce model structural/parameter/input uncertainty in hydrological prediction?) by proposing a skill assessment framework that isolates gains from hydrological model forcings and forecast initialisation. Our results show that a good estimation of the hydrologic states, such as soil moisture or lake levels, prior to the prediction is the most important factor in obtaining accurate streamflow predictions in both setups. We also show that the spread in internal model states varies largely between the two systems, reflecting the differences in their setups and calibration strategies, and highlighting that caution is needed before extracting hydrologic variables other than streamflow.This work also provides insights into UPH 21 (How can the (un)certainty in hydrological predictions be communicated to decision makers and the general public?). Despite the expected high performance from the catchment setup against observed streamflow, the continental setup can, in some catchments, match the catchment-specific setup for 3-month aggregations and when looking at statistics relative to model climatology, such as anomalies. Nevertheless, differences in the setups can result in different uncertainties for variables such as soil water content.

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Skill assessment of post-processing methods for ECMWF SEAS5 seasonal forecasts over Europe

10.5194/egusphere-egu21-11019 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Alice Crespi ◽

Marcello Petitta ◽

Lucas Grigis ◽

Paola Marson ◽

Jean-Michel Soubeyroux ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Production Management ◽

Spatial Scales ◽

Research Field ◽

Skill Assessment ◽

Post Processing ◽

Seasonal Forecasts ◽

Climate Services ◽

Local Climate ◽

Climate Conditions

Seasonal forecasts provide information on climate conditions several months ahead and therefore they could represent a valuable support for decision making, warning systems as well as for the optimization of industry and energy sectors. However, forecast systems can be affected by systematic biases and have horizontal resolutions which are typically coarser than the spatial scales of the practical applications. For this reason, the reliability of forecasts needs to be carefully assessed before applying and interpreting them for specific applications. In addition, the use of post-processing approaches is recommended in order to improve the representativeness of the large-scale predictions of regional and local climate conditions. The development and evaluation downscaling and bias-correction procedures aiming at improving the skills of the forecasts and the quality of derived climate services is currently an open research field. In this context, we evaluated the skills of ECMWF SEAS5 forecasts of monthly mean temperature, total precipitation and wind speed over Europe and we assessed the skill improvements of calibrated predictions.For the calibration, we combined a bilinear interpolation and a quantile mapping approach to obtain corrected monthly forecasts on a 0.25&#176;x0.25&#176; grid from the original 1&#176;x1&#176; values. The forecasts were corrected against the reference ERA5 reanalysis over the hindcast period 1993&#8211;2016. The processed forecasts were compared over the same domain and period with another calibrated set of ECMWF SEAS5 forecasts obtained by the ADAMONT statistical method.The skill assessment was performed by means of both deterministic and probabilistic verification metrics evaluated over seasonal forecasted aggregations for the first lead time. Greater skills of the forecast systems in Europe were generally observed in spring and summer, especially for temperature, with a spatial distribution varying with the seasons. The calibration was proved to effectively correct the model biases for all variables, however the metrics not accounting for bias did not show significant improvements in most cases, and in some areas and seasons even small degradations in skills were observed.The presented study supported the activities of the H2020 European project SECLI-FIRM on the improvement of the seasonal forecast applicability for energy production, management and assessment.

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Seasonal forecast verification and application in times of change

10.5194/esd-2016-60 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Yoav Levi ◽

Itzhak Carmona

Keyword(s):

Warming Trend ◽

Seasonal Forecast ◽

Forecast Skill ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Economic Environment ◽

Boreal Summer ◽

Seasonal Forecasts ◽

Climate Services ◽

The Past ◽

Skill Scores

Abstract. Seasonal forecast is being promoted as one of the climate services given to the public and decision makers also in the extra-tropics. However seasonal forecast is a scientific challenge. Rapid changes in climate and the socio-economic environment in the past 30 years introduce even a bigger challenge for the end-users of seasonal forecasts based on the past 30 years. Decision makers should relay on a forecast only if they fully understand the forecast skill and the forecast will not be a completely erroneous.Therefore, the percentage of forecasts for above normal condition that realized to be below normal conditions and vice versa is measured straightforwardly by the "Fiasco score". To overcome the climate and socio-economic environment changes an attempt to relate the next seasonal forecast to the previous season forecast and observed values was tested.The findings indicate that ECMWF system-4 seasonal forecast skill for June-July-August (JJA) temperatures for the marine tropics is very promising as indicated by all the skill scores, including using the previous JJA forecast as the base for the next JJA season. However for the boreal summer temperatures forecast over land, the main source of the model predictability originates from the warming trend along the hindcast period. Over the Middle East and Mongolia removing the temperature trend eliminated the high forecast skill. Evaluation of the ability of the next season forecast to predict the changes relative to the previous year's season has shown a positive skill in some areas compared to the traditional 30 years based climatology after both forecasts and observed data were de-trend.

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Continental and global hydro-climatic forecasting services to address user needs for the water-related sectors

10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-16035 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Thomas Bosshard ◽

Berit Arheimer ◽

Louise Crochemore ◽

Frida Gyllensvärd ◽

Ilias Pechlivanidis ◽

...

Keyword(s):

River Flow ◽

Service Providers ◽

Potential Evapotranspiration ◽

Global Climate ◽

Water Discharge ◽

User Needs ◽

Catchment Scale ◽

Climate Services ◽

Time Horizons ◽

Long Time

Addressing the user needs at the local and large scales remains an ongoing scientific and operational effort to the various hydro-climatic service providers. The evolution of hydro-climatic services has received high attention, particularly given the recent scientific and computational advancements that have led to skillful meteorological forecasts at time horizons from sub-seasonal (up to 6 weeks ahead) to seasonal (up to a year ahead). Sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasts have great potential for user groups that are affected by climatic variations and that could manage such variations to their advantage through better predictions. Therefore the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute co-developed with users from the water-related sectors a demonstrator interface to communicate the ensemble of pan-European and global hydro-climatic indicators at the catchment scale.&#160;Here we present these operational hydro-climatic services for the long time horizons, and focus on the setup, the implementation and the challenges. The provided hydro-climatic forecasts are based on the bias-adjusted meteorological forecasts from ECMWF (i.e. daily precipitation and daily mean, maximum and minimum temperature) and the pan-European E-HYPE and global WW-HYPE hydrological models (http://hypeweb.smhi.se/). The forecasts are updated frequently when the newly initialised forecasts become available. Hydro-climatic information for variables such as river flow, water discharge, actual and potential evapotranspiration, soil water content, precipitation and temperature is presented as maps and graphs, for both climatology and forecast period. The service provides also the option to download the forecast information (catchment scale) including also the metadata and forecast skill information. The map shows the anomaly for each catchment and lead time using as reference either the catchment&#8217;s normal conditions (based on terciles) or extremes (10th and 90th percentiles) for the period of interest. To overcome misinterpretation of the forecasted information, we set as default the option to the user to mask the catchments in which forecasts have no skill (based on re-forecast analysis); meaning that climatology is more predictive than ECMWF forecasts. The graphs display the median and different percentiles of the ensemble of forecasts, and the high and low thresholds of the normal and extreme conditions for the period of interest.&#160;KeywordsSeasonal hydro-meteorological forecasting, Copernicus C3S, global climate services

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Integrated Impact Assessment for Sustainable Hydropower Planning in the Vjosa Catchment (Greece, Albania)

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13031514 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

pp. 1514

Author(s):

Rebecca Peters ◽

Jürgen Berlekamp ◽

Ana Lucía ◽

Vittoria Stefani ◽

Klement Tockner ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Impact Assessment ◽

Planning Process ◽

Renewable Energy Sources ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Catchment Scale ◽

Northern Greece ◽

Hydropower Plants ◽

Hydropower Planning

Mitigating climate change, while human population and economy are growing globally, requires a bold shift to renewable energy sources. Among renewables, hydropower is currently the most economic and efficient technique. However, due to a lack of impact assessments at the catchment scale in the planning process, the construction of hydropower plants (HPP) may have unexpected ecological, socioeconomic, and political ramifications in the short and in the long term. The Vjosa River, draining parts of Northern Greece and Albania, is one of the few predominantly free-flowing rivers left in Europe; at the same time its catchment is identified an important resource for future hydropower development. While current hydropower plants are located along tributaries, planned HPP would highly impact the free-flowing main stem. Taking the Vjosa catchment as a case study, the aim of this study was to develop a transferable impact assessment that ranks potential hydropower sites according to their projected impacts on a catchment scale. Therefore, we integrated established ecological, social, and economic indicators for all HPP planned in the river catchment, while considering their capacity, and developed a ranking method based on impact categories. For the Vjosa catchment, ten hydropower sites were ranked as very harmful to the environment as well as to society. A sensitivity analysis revealed that this ranking is dependent upon the selection of indicators. Small HPP showed higher cumulative impacts than large HPP, when normalized to capacity. This study empowers decision-makers to compare both the ranked impacts and the generated energy of planned dam projects at the catchment scale.

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REVIEW OF SEASONAL CLIMATE FORECASTING FOR AGRICULTURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Experimental Agriculture ◽

10.1017/s0014479710000876 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 205-240 ◽

Cited By ~ 148

Author(s):

JAMES W. HANSEN ◽

SIMON J. MASON ◽

LIQIANG SUN ◽

ARAME TALL

Keyword(s):

Smallholder Farmers ◽

Seasonal Forecast ◽

Sub Saharan Africa ◽

Seasonal Forecasting ◽

Seasonal Forecasts ◽

Climate Services ◽

Seasonal Climate ◽

Climate Forecasting ◽

Probabilistic Forecasts ◽

Sub Saharan

SUMMARYWe review the use and value of seasonal climate forecasting for agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with a view to understanding and exploiting opportunities to realize more of its potential benefits. Interaction between the atmosphere and underlying oceans provides the basis for probabilistic forecasts of climate conditions at a seasonal lead-time, including during cropping seasons in parts of SSA. Regional climate outlook forums (RCOF) and national meteorological services (NMS) have been at the forefront of efforts to provide forecast information for agriculture. A survey showed that African NMS often go well beyond the RCOF process to improve seasonal forecast information and disseminate it to the agricultural sector. Evidence from a combination of understanding of how climatic uncertainty impacts agriculture, model-based ex-ante analyses, subjective expressions of demand or value, and the few well-documented evaluations of actual use and resulting benefit suggests that seasonal forecasts may have considerable potential to improve agricultural management and rural livelihoods. However, constraints related to legitimacy, salience, access, understanding, capacity to respond and data scarcity have so far limited the widespread use and benefit from seasonal prediction among smallholder farmers. Those constraints that reflect inadequate information products, policies or institutional process can potentially be overcome. Additional opportunities to benefit rural communities come from expanding the use of seasonal forecast information for coordinating input and credit supply, food crisis management, trade and agricultural insurance. The surge of activity surrounding seasonal forecasting in SSA following the 1997/98 El Niño has waned in recent years, but emerging initiatives, such as the Global Framework for Climate Services and ClimDev-Africa, are poised to reinvigorate support for seasonal forecast information services for agriculture. We conclude with a discussion of institutional and policy changes that we believe will greatly enhance the benefits of seasonal forecasting to agriculture in SSA.

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Evaluation of Criteria for the Implementation of High-Performance Computing (HPC) in Danube Region Countries Using Fuzzy PIPRECIA Method

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su12073017 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (7) ◽

pp. 3017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Milovan Tomašević ◽

Lucija Lapuh ◽

Željko Stević ◽

Dragiša Stanujkić ◽

Darjan Karabašević

Keyword(s):

High Performance Computing ◽

High Performance ◽

Correlation Coefficients ◽

Business Environment ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Fuzzy Environment ◽

Danube Region ◽

Criteria Importance ◽

Importance Assessment ◽

Performance Computing

The use of computers with outstanding performance has become a real necessity in order to achieve greater efficiency and sustainability for the accomplishment of various tasks. Therefore, with the development of information technology and increasing dynamism in the business environment, it is expected that these computers will be more intensively deployed. In this paper, research was conducted in Danube region countries: Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. The aim of the research was to determine what criteria are most significant for the introduction of high-performance computing and the real situation in each of the countries. In addition, the aim was to establish the infrastructure needed to implement such a system. In order to determine the partial significance of each criterion and thus the possibility of implementing high-performance computing, a multi-criteria model in a fuzzy environment was applied. The weights of criteria and their rankings were performed using the Fuzzy PIvot Pairwise RElative Criteria Importance Assessment—fuzzy PIPRECIA method. The results indicate different values depend on decision-makers (DMs) in the countries. Spearman’s and Pearson’s correlation coefficients were calculated to verify the results obtained.

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Creating Useful and Usable Weather and Climate Information: Insights from Participatory Scenario Planning in Malawi

Climate Risk in Africa ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-61160-6_5 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 77-92

Author(s):

Dorothy Tembo-Nhlema ◽

Katharine Vincent ◽

Rebecka Henriksson

Keyword(s):

Scenario Planning ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Climate Information ◽

Seasonal Forecasts ◽

Early Adopters ◽

Demonstration Effect ◽

Initial Investigation ◽

Usable Information ◽

Weather And Climate ◽

Grassroots Level

AbstractFor climate information to be used at the grassroots level, it needs to be understood, collectively interpreted and effectively communicated. Participatory Scenario Planning (PSP) is one method of co-producing useful and usable sectoral and livelihood advisories for decision-makers, based on locally downscaled weather (typically seasonal forecasts). The chapter outlines an initial investigation into the history and application of PSP in Malawi, finding that it can generate useful and usable information that is deemed credible, legitimate and salient by its intended users. Its usability is reinforced through the demonstration effect which leads to even sceptical farmers adopting it after they have witnessed proof of its effectiveness from early adopters. In Malawi, the sustainability of PSP is threatened due to limited integration in planning frameworks and reliance on projects, hence need for a mechanism to ensure its regular occurrence and embeddedness in formal governance structures.

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The Match Between Structural Attributes and Content-Based Orientation of Managerial Cognition: An Exploratory fsQCA Study of ‘Hidden Champions’

Management and Organization Review ◽

10.1017/mor.2021.44 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-29

Author(s):

Linan Lei ◽

Yanan Fu ◽

Xiaobo Wu ◽

Jian Du

Keyword(s):

High Performance ◽

Qualitative Comparative Analysis ◽

Empirical Method ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Strategic Decision ◽

Cognitive Content ◽

Managerial Cognition ◽

Organizational Action ◽

Structure Complexity ◽

Technology Orientation

ABSTRACT Strategic decision makers interpret information and translate it into organizational action through the lens of strategic schemas. How should firms realize high performance with various strategic schemas? Cognitive content and structure have been shown to underlie strategic schemas, but few studies have considered them together. This study employs aggregation analysis to clarify the interaction between cognitive content (technology orientation, market orientation) and structure (complexity, centrality) in affecting the firm performance (FP) of ‘hidden champion’ companies, identified by the Economy and Information Technology Department of Zhejiang Province, China. The empirical method applies fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to generate strategic schema profiles for high FP. This exploratory study fills a gap in the literature on managerial cognition and provides key lessons from ‘hidden champion’ companies in China and their paths for small- and medium-sized enterprises to grow.

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Exploring the Dynamics of Base-Excited Structures Impacting a Rigid Stop

Mathematical Problems in Engineering ◽

10.1155/2020/6721025 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2020 ◽

pp. 1-12

Author(s):

Peter J. Christopher ◽

Barnaby Dobson ◽

Nicholas A. Alexander

Keyword(s):

High Performance ◽

Degrees Of Freedom ◽

Equations Of Motion ◽

Performance Measure ◽

Nonsmooth Dynamics ◽

Structural Parameter ◽

Sigmoid Function ◽

Stiffness Ratio ◽

Complex Behaviour ◽

Interstorey Drift

This paper explores the nonlinear dynamics of a multidegree of freedom (MDoF) structure impacting a rigid stop. The contact mechanics is simplified by continuous sigmoid function idealisation of a lossless spring. By introducing a smooth nonlinear formulation, we avoid the computational expense of event-driven, piecewise, nonsmooth dynamics. A large parametric study using high-performance computing is undertaken. The nondimensional equations of motion suggest one primary structural parameter, contact-to-storey stiffness ratio, and two excitation parameters, nondimensional ground amplitude and frequency. Bifurcation plots indicate an extremely rich and complex behaviour, particularly in the cases where at least two-floor degrees of freedom (DoFs) impact the stop and when the contact-to-storey stiffness ratio is large. When considering interstorey drift as a performance measure, period-1 impacting solutions are generally favourable when compared to an analogous nonimpacting case. This paper also discusses whether chaotic impacting can be favourable. Finally, we consider the question of whether higher modes are significantly excited, at a linear resonance, for impacting solutions to this system.

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Making Society Climate Resilient: International Progress under the Global Framework for Climate Services

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society ◽

10.1175/bams-d-18-0211.1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 101 (2) ◽

pp. E237-E252 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

C. D. Hewitt ◽

E. Allis ◽

S. J. Mason ◽

M. Muth ◽

R. Pulwarty ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Time Scales ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Climate Information ◽

Climate Services ◽

Socioeconomic Impacts ◽

Policy Makers ◽

The Past ◽

New Directions ◽

Operational Activities ◽

Available Information

Abstract There is growing awareness among governments, businesses, and the general public of risks arising from changes to our climate on time scales from months through to decades. Some climatic changes could be unprecedented in their harmful socioeconomic impacts, while others with adequate forewarning and planning could offer benefits. There is therefore a pressing need for decision-makers, including policy-makers, to have access to and to use high-quality, accessible, relevant, and credible climate information about the past, present, and future to help make better-informed decisions and policies. We refer to the provision and use of such information as climate services. Established programs of research and operational activities are improving observations and climate monitoring, our understanding of climate processes, climate variability and change, and predictions and projections of the future climate. Delivering climate information (including data and knowledge) in a way that is usable and useful for decision-makers has had less attention, and society has yet to optimally benefit from the available information. While weather services routinely help weather-sensitive decision-making, similar services for decisions on longer time scales are less well established. Many organizations are now actively developing climate services, and a growing number of decision-makers are keen to benefit from such services. This article describes progress made over the past decade developing, delivering, and using climate services, in particular from the worldwide effort galvanizing around the Global Framework for Climate Services under the coordination of UN agencies. The article highlights challenges in making further progress and proposes potential new directions to address such challenges.

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