Use of the National Water Model and New Satellite Tools in the Hurricane Harvey Case

During June and July of 2017, official and experimental guidance from NOAA’s National Water Model (NWM) were used in the Flash Flood and Intense Rainfall (FFaIR) forecast exercise. On 22 August, only a month after the FFaIR exercise, experimental NWM guidance was generated to support real-time forecasting and decision making for the impending hydrologic event associated with Hurricane Harvey. Following the destructive Hurricane Harvey floods in southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana on 26-31 August, UCAR’s COMET program was tasked with developing training to demonstrate the uses of NWM guidance with hands-on exercises. The Hurricane Harvey case was selected as a case example for this training. At the same time, the COMET Program was developing and publishing lessons about the latest satellite science from polar orbiters and GOES 16. In parallel with the NWM training, the COMET Program is developing a satellite hydrology case using the Hurricane Harvey data.

This talk will explore training on the promising uses of the NWM and satellite tools, the evolution of products, and some current limitations. It will do this using one of the highest-impact hydrometeorological events of recent years.

The COMET Program, located at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, was formed in 1989 to facilitate research-to-operations for the modernization of NOAA’s National Weather Service. Nearly 30 years later, COMET continues to develop and deliver interactive training, both instructor-led and self-paced online, to support using new technologies and scientific advances. Today, COMET Program training reaches a much larger and more diverse set of users in multiple levels of government, both domestic and international, as well as users in the university community, private enterprise, and the broadcast meteorologist communities.

All of the COMET Program’s material is supported by the MetEd website, www.meted.ucar.edu, which includes a quiz tracking system, lesson descriptions, a graphics library, and in some cases translations (mainly Spanish) for non-English speakers.