Leveraging CHPS for NWS Weather Forecast Office Decision Support

The National Weather Service (NWS) has made a major effort over the past 5 years to implement the Community Hydrologic Prediction System (CHPS) in River Forecast Centers (RFCs) as replacement architecture and modeling environment for producing operational flood and water resources forecasts. This new architecture, based on Deltares FEWS, affords a great deal more configurable flexibility, the integration and sharing of new models, and an interactive graphics environment that leads to a much better understanding of model condition and behavior. All 13 NWS RFCs transitioned to this new architecture between October 2010 and December 2011.

Key features of CHPS allow WFOs to gain access to a portion of the environment supported by their RFC(s). Although significant training and operational support issues remain undefined and unresolved, the potential benefits led NWS Western Region to begin investigating the capability with a limited number of offices. Two different operational paradigms and potential applications are described in an effort to bring additional hydrologic modeling capability and insight to the WFO hydrology program.