NOAA's National Water Model–Integration of National Water Model with Geospatial Data creating Water Intelligence

As a significant step forward to transform NOAA’s water prediction services, NOAA plans to implement a new National Water Model (NWM) Version 1.0 in August 2016. A continental scale water resources model, the NWM is an evolution of the WRF-Hydro architecture developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The NWM will provide analyses and forecasts of flow for the 2.7 million stream-reaches nationwide in the National Hydrography Dataset Plus v2 (NHDPlusV2) jointly developed by the USGS and EPA. The NWM also produces high-resolution water budget variables of snow, soil moisture, and evapotranspiration on a 1-km grid. Forecasts range from hours to 30 days. NOAA’s stakeholders require additional decision support applications to be built upon these data. 

The Geo-intelligence division of the Office of Water Prediction is building new products and services that integrate output from the NWM with geospatial datasets such as infrastructure and demographics to better estimate the impacts of hydrologic extremes on communities. Moreover, the transformation of information to intelligence is the basis for decision support services, a goal of the NWS Weather and Water Ready Nation. This presentation will explore the underlying geospatial framework of the NWM; identify initial key data sets to be integrated with NWM output; and detail the methods used to produce prototypes water resources intelligence that is timely, actionable and credible. Moreover, it will to explore the NWM capability to support sector-specific decision support services.