Tuesday, 24 January 2017: 5:00 PM
604 (Washington State Convention Center )
Rainfall-runoff models used in Bureau of Reclamation flood analyses require a variety of input data, such as, but not limited to, precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, wind speed, and freezing-level height. Precipitation data are important for these models because the spatial pattern and temporal distributions can define the extent and magnitude of the hydrologic response within a specified watershed. Radar data can provide both high spatial resolution (less than 1 km) and rapid temporal resolution (less than 10 minutes) in areas of the western US where beam blockage isn’t a problem. Using the NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit allows for a straight forward methodology to download radar data and transform it into a useable format in ArcGIS. Once in ArcGIS, the radar data can be used to create spatial and temporal storm patterns for use in both lumped and gridded rainfall-runoff models. An example of the temporal and spatial storm patterns that can be created using this methodology will be presented.
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