Please join us for the next CILER-GLERL Great Lakes seminar:
Speaker: Becky Bolinger, NOAA-GLERL
Title: Improving Climate Information for Operational Lake Level Forecasting
Time: 10:30 – 11:30 am ET on Monday 13-July 2015
Location: NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab, 4840 South State Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48108 (http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/facil/triptik.html)
You do not need to register to attend. There will not be a webinar for this presentation.
Abstract: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers currently forecasts six months of water levels for the Great Lakes by relying on output from two statistical models and a hydrologic model (AHPS) provided by NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Laboratory (GLERL). These models are initiated by temperature and precipitation forecasts that are estimated from an analysis of the Climate Prediction Center’s long-term outlooks. A new methodology is being employed that increases efficiency and accuracy in the inputs that these water level forecasts are dependent upon. This new forecast method relies on an ensemble of climate models, can be used for a targeted region (such as each of the Great Lakes basins), and automatically estimates lake basin-averaged temperature and precipitation in a probabilistic framework. A skill assessment of the various climate model estimates will be used to determine which model most accurately captures the climate variability over the Great Lakes region. A web tool is also being designed that will further aid forecasters in estimating seasonal outlooks of precipitation and temperature.