Great Lakes Observing & Forecasting Systems

Overview and Objectives

GLERL is working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and NOAA National Water Center (NWC) to develop and improve the Weather Research and Forecasting model hydrological modeling extension package (WRF-Hydro) for the Great Lakes Region. At present, the existing hydrologic, land surface and watershed data used in WRF-Hydro are 1) incomplete, e.g., missing the Canadian portion, 2) contain inadequate spatial resolution to simulate the channel routing module of the hydrologic model, or 3) comprise data sets in different spatio-temporal resolution in different formats.

In order to accelerate WRF-Hydro model development, this project will develop standardized and harmonized input data files available from the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework (GLAHF) database to be used in WRF-Hydro simulations in the Great Lakes region. We will process data at different spatial resolutions and in various data formats including netCDF, ASCII, and ARC/GIS shapefiles, with appropriate metadata to meet NOAA environmental data archiving requirements. These data will serve as foundation for GLERL’s GIS data warehouse, and will be made available to all scientists at GLERL. The newly created high-resolution datasets will provide the required input to configure and test WRF-Hydro, thus accelerating GLERL’s capability to develop and improve WRF-Hydro in the Great lakes region. This project will also create many critical datasets and data layers in uniform format that can be used for future development of the Great Lakes Forecasting System and serve the Great Lakes community, as well.