Integration of Great Lakes Water Resources into National and Continental Systems for Weather and Climate Prediction

The Laurentian Great Lakes contain over 20% of the world's surface fresh water and provide drinking water, recreation, shipping access, ecosystems, and other services to impact the lives of a large fraction of the population of the United States and Canada. While weather and climate outside of the immediate drainage basin affects the water budget within the basin, this can also work in reverse, with the lakes affecting the weather, sometimes on a large spatial scale. The advent of the variant of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model with enhanced hydrologic capability (WRF-Hydro) provides an opportunity to put Great Lakes water resources within a standardized framework for cooperation in weather and climate prediction at the scale of the conterminous United States and North America as a whole. Hindrances to this in the past have included a lack of modeling systems sufficiently standardized to talk across the larger-scale forecasting systems and the Great Lakes-specific water resource system, and the international data stream needed for elements such as radar-based precipitation products, seasonal-scale climate outlooks, and detailed land elevation data for stream routing. We will discuss plans for work using WRF-Hydro at various time scales, incorporating all of the Laurentian Great Lakes into continental-scale forecasts, with special attention to water resources.