Author: Jacob A Zwart,  Postdoctoral Fellow (U.S. Geological Survey)

Description:
The Delaware River Basin (DRB) is an ecologically diverse region and a societally important watershed along the East Coast of the United States. Managers of reservoir operations within the DRB need to balance supplying enough drinking water to over 13 million people while also timing the releases of cool water to maintain suitable cold-water habitat for economically important fisheries downstream. Accurate forecasts of water temperature are needed to aid managers making decisions about when and how much water to release downstream. To this end, we have developed a modeling framework capable of assimilating water flow and temperature observations to forecast stream network water temperature at broad scales in support of management decisions. This framework leverages the extensive monitoring networks from multiple agencies as well as a process-based streamflow and temperature model, the coupled Precipitation-Runoff Modelling System and Stream Network Temperature model (PRMS-SNTemp). Our stream temperature forecasting model uses the ensemble Kalman filter to assimilate observations at hundreds of DRB locations into PRMS-SNTemp to predict streamflow and water temperature 10 days into the future. We evaluate model performance for predictive accuracy and ability to predict exceedances of thermal thresholds at select management-relevant locations within the DRB. These results quantify current model skill and will serve as benchmarks against which future modelling efforts can demonstrate advancement toward a valuable and novel stream temperature forecasting capability.

Category: Scientific Program Abstract > Special Session > SS08 Forecasting is the Future: Advancing Methods and Applications of Near-term, Iterative Ecological Forecasting in Aquatic Ecosystems