A hydrometeorological warning system for Mexico (HWS-Mex): A plan and its first stages of development

It has been planned and initiated the development of a hydrometeorological warning system for Mexico. The system incorporates all the real-time information available from different sources. The main objective is to develop operational rainfall tools for:

• Estimation (last 1-24 hours); • Nowcasting (next 3 hours); • Forecast (next 6-24 hours).

These tools will be based on satellite, radar, weather stations and mesoescale numerical models (MNM) products in real time basis, with, known and reasonable, accuracy and reliability to support hydrometeorological warnings.

In order to develop this system we have planned 5 main stages of its development: Stage1. Integration, calibration and error evaluation of rainfall estimations based on satellites, radars and weather stations information for Mexico. Stage2. Comparison of events with historical records to percentile stratification, in order to define regional and monthly warnings thresholds. Stage 3. Calibration of MNM (MM5 and ETA) with the products obtained in Stage 1. Stage 4. Nowcasting, considering MNM calibrated in Stage 3 and the extrapolation of Mesoscale Convective Complexes (MCC) track and intensity over México. Stage 5. Experimental real-time application and evaluation and refining of Stages 1-4.

In this work we are going to present results of stages 1 and 2, some preliminary results of stages 3 and 4, and a discussion of stage 5. For Stage 1, we have calibrated, bias corrected and compared rainfall estimations during 1997-2002 periods. For Stage 2, we have made statistics of the weather stations intensity and accumulated rainfalls for different periods (0.5, 1, 2, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48 and 72 hours) during the last years, in order to define a base for comparison of real-time intensity and accumulated rainfalls.