Baron Advanced Meteorological Systems, in collaboration with the Hydrologic Research Center, the US National Weather Service Office of Hydrology, and Dr. Christa Peters-Lidard of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has developed an end-to-end hydrometeorological forecasting system. The system, known as the Baron Hydrological Forecast and Modeling System (BHFMS), relies upon gauge-corrected hourly to sub-hourly Doppler-radar-based QPF estimates supplying inputs to advanced hydrological model forecast systems. Numerical weather prediction models comprise additional, longer-range elements of the forecast system. For larger-scales, the NWSRFS (National Weather Service River Forecast System), using the Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting Model (SAC/SMA) and appropriate river/stream routing, is used to detect and forecast river flood/stage. Nested within this, the contributions from upstream higher-order basins are estimated with the TOPLATS model running as a land-data-assimilation system (LDAS). Both mean-areal precipitation estimates (needed for the SAC/SMA model) and very high resolution estimates (needed for the fully distributed TOPLATS model) are derived from the networked-mosaic Doppler system.

The system also includes a flash-flood guidance component, in which soil-moisture deficits are estimated from either the SAC/SMA model or the TOPLATS model. The deficits are used together with up-to-date (1 hr, 3hr, 6hr, and 12hr) precipitation totals to estimate the amount of additional precipitation needed for streams to reach bankful. Our system is unique in that it is comprised not only of the modeling components including a fully distributed hydrological model, but of the radar-hardware and interpretation software needed to drive the models: that is, it is a complete end-to-end system that may be deployed anywhere in the world.

During this talk, we will describe the components of the system and the advantages it offers toward the understanding and prediction of hydrometeorological events.