Development of a monthly to seasonal forecast framework tailored to inland waterway transport in central Europe

Meißner, Dennis; Klein, Bastian; Ionita, Monica

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-6401-2017

Articles | Volume 21, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-6401-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

Sub-seasonal to seasonal hydrological forecasting

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-6401-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 12

Research article

|

15 Dec 2017

Research article |

| 15 Dec 2017

Development of a monthly to seasonal forecast framework tailored to inland waterway transport in central Europe

Dennis Meißner, Bastian Klein, and Monica Ionita

Data sets

Gridded precipitation and temperature data European Climate Assessment & Dataset http://www.ecad.eu/download/ensembles/

Precipitation and temperature data German Meteorological Service DWD ftp://ftp-cdc.dwd.de/pub/CDC/

Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature dataset NOAA https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/marineocean-data/extended-reconstructed-sea-surface-temperature-ersst-v4

Volumetric Soil Moisture data Earth System Research Laboratory https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.derived.surfaceflux.html

Soil moisture, geopotential height, sea level pressure and relative humidity NCAR http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/SOURCES/.NOAA/.NCEP-NCAR/.CDAS-1/.MONTHLY/

ERA-Interim dataset ECMWF http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-full-daily/levtype=sfc/

Short summary

Inland waterway transport is a commercial sector relying on hydrological forecasts on different timescales. This paper describes the set-up of a monthly to seasonal forecasting system for the German waterways. Multiple approaches are tested, compared and combined. Despite the predictive limitations on longer lead times, this study reveals the existence of a valuable predictability on monthly up to seasonal timescales. Forecast quality depends on forecast location, lead time and season.