The Implementation of a River Forecasting System in Romania

The Destructive Waters, or DESWAT, program is an initiative of the Romania Ministry of Environment and Water Management to improve the water management authority National Administration Apele Romane's flood monitoring capacity, as well as to improve its National Institute of Hydrology and Water Management flood modeling and prediction capabilities. The terrain of Romania varies from extremely mountainous regions to large flood plane regions, resulting in an extremely diverse and complex river/stream topology. This diversity of terrain along with the wide range of weather conditions in Romania lead to significant problems with river flooding and flash flooding throughout the country. The NWS River Forecast System (RFS) will be used as one of the forecasting tools for DESWAT. The RFS will be running the lumped Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting Model (SAC/SMA), a relevant RFS routing model or models, and the SNOW-17 snow-pack model. Extended forecasts up to 90 days will be generated using RFS Ensemble Streamflow Prediction (ESP) module. The system is integrated with new DESWAT sensor observations together with appropriate data from radar, rain gauges, and surface observations. These data are used to compute traditional Mean-Areal Precipitation (MAP) and Mean-Areal Temperature (MAT). Forecasted precipitation and temperature is acquired from an available meteorological model. Implementation and calibration of the RFS for an initial basin will be discussed. This paper provides an overview of the data used, the issues encountered during setup and calibration, and the data flows to support the forecasting system for this first basin.