Virtual Workshop on Sub-seasonal to Seasonal Climate Forecasting for Water Management in the Western U.S.

Date	March 15-17, 2022
Venue	Virtual (Zoom), three 3-hour online sessions, 2:00-5:10pm EDT (18:00-21:10 UTC)
Agenda	Link to Agenda
Target Audience	Cimate researchers and forecasters, hydrologists, water managers
Organizing Committee	A.W. Robertson and B. Singh/IRI, X. Zeng/U.Az, M. DeFlorio/CW3E/Scripps, D.Waliser/JPL, A. Lam-Wright/IRI
Contact	ude.aibmuloc.irinull@2202-retaw-s2s
Register (Free)	https://events.columbia.edu/go/s2s_water_2022

It is widely recognised that effective climate services for water management requires co-development involving climate researchers, forecasters, hydrologists and water managers. This workshop will provide a forum for cross-community dialog and sharing of the latest research results and work on integrating science with services. It will highlight recent advances in short-term climate predictions of conditions concerning water availability (e.g. precipitation, snowpack, drought) over the western US to better inform water resource managers, and on translating climate forecasts into products to directly inform water management decisions. While the workshop topics will include the subseasonal range, emphasis and priorities for presentations and discussion will be on 1) seasonal to interannual lead-times, 2) seamless prediction systems across time scales, and then 3) subseasonal lead-times. 

Nationally, several federal agencies (e.g., NOAA, NASA, USGS), state agencies (e.g., California Department of Water Resources, Western States Water Council), research centers (e.g., CW3E, IRI), and universities are involved in the observations, modeling, and understanding relevant to such forecasts. Internationally, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has developed the Action Plan on Hydrology. To support this plan, WMO is developing the research strategy for the next decade on the areas of priority research (e.g., through WCRP/GEWEX in collaboration with other international programs) that has a direct application to improving operational hydrology and the operations of National Hydrological and Meteorological Services.  

Building on these activities, this workshop will begin with an invited session on Meeting Stakeholder Needs, with speakers from the US Army Corps of Engineers, US Bureau of Reclamation, NOAA River Forecasting Center, California Department of Water Resources, and the Salt River Project. Questions to be addressed in this session include: Are the current seasonal forecasts useful and used in water resource management and planning in the western U.S.? What information is actually used in water resource management and planning? What are the priority forecasting products, including their lead times and averaging periods, needed for water resource management and planning?

The second and third sessions welcome contributed talks on Predictability Assessments and New Forecasting Methodologies, respectively. Questions to be addressed in this session are: What are the potential sources for seasonal (or monthly to interannual) predictability for the western U.S.? What quantities are predictable? What are the upper bounds of seasonal (or monthly to interannual) prediction? Contributions on New Forecasting Methodologies that translate predictability into skillful water-management relevant forecast products (probabilistic and deterministic), including empirical, dynamical, hybrid, machine learning etc, are particularly welcome.

Workshop Agenda

	Session 1: Meeting Stakeholder Needs [Tuesday, 15 March 2022 2:00pm-5:10pm EDT] Session chairs: Andrew Robertson and Duane Waliser
	Session 1 Vimeo recording HERE
2:00pm	Welcome: Andrew Robertson (IRI, Columbia University) and Duane Waliser (JPL, California Institute of Technology, NASA)
2:05pm	Bradley Doorn (NASA)
2:15pm	Jeanine Jones, (California Department of Water Resources) S2S Precipitation Forecasting to Support Drought Preparedness
2:40pm	Dave DeWitt (NOAA Climate Prediction Center) Past, Present, and Future of Sub-Seasonal to Seasonal (S2S) Precipitation Forecasting
3:05pm	Cary Talbot, co-authors Joseph C. Forbis and Patrick F. Sing (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) USACE: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Water Management Perspectives on S2S Climate Forecasting
3:30pm	[10 min break]
3:40pm	John Lhotak (NOAA Colorado Basin River Forecast Center) Challenges with Applying S2S Forecasts in Hydrologic Modeling
4:05pm	Bohumil Svoma (Salt River Project) S2S Weather Forecasts and Seasonal Streamflow Forecasting in Central Arizona
4:30pm	Kenneth Nowak (US Bureau of Reclamation) Further evaluation of the S2S Rodeo winning AI methods
4:55pm	Discussion (15 mins)
	Session 2: Predictability Assessments [Wednesday, 16 March 2022 2:00pm-5:10pm EDT]
	Session 2 Vimeo recording HERE
	Session chairs: Mike DeFlorio, Agniv Sengupta
2:00pm	Bohar Singh (International Research Institute for Climate and Society) co-authors Andrew W. Robertson, Ángel Muñoz, and Jing Yuan Subseasonal to Seasonal Weather-Regime and Precipitation Forecasts for the Western United States
2:20pm	Zhenhai Zhang (Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes) co-authors Michael J. DeFlorio, Luca Delle Monache1, Aneesh C. Subramanian, F. Martin Ralph, Duane E. Waliser, Minghua Zheng, Bin Guan, Alexander Goodman, Andrea M Molod, Frederic Vitart, Arun Kumar, and Hai Lin   CW3E: Multi-Model Subseasonal Prediction Skill Assessment of Water Vapor Transport Associated with Atmospheric Rivers over the Western U.S.
2:40pm	Wei Zhang (Utah State University) co-authors Vittal Hari, Simon S-Y Wang, Matthew D. LaPlante, Gregg Garfin, Grace Affram, and Rohini Kumar Utah State: Fewer Troughs, Not More Ridges, Have Led to a Drying Trend in the Western United States
3:00pm	Xianan Jiang, (Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Sci. & Engineering/UCLA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory) co-authors Duane Waliser, Peter Gibson, and Gang Chen Why it is challenging to predict winter precipitation over California?
3:20pm	[10 min break]
3:30pm	Emerson LaJoie (NOAA Federal, Climate Prediction Center) CPC’s Experimental Water Year Outlook Tool
3:50pm	Jiabao Wang, (Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes) co-authors Michael J. DeFlorio, Bin Guan, and Christopher Castellano MJO impacts on precipitation extremes over the western U.S.: seasonality and QBO modulation
4:10pm	Wei-Ting Hsiao (Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University) co-authors Elizabeth A. Barnes, Eric D. Maloney, Stefan N. Tulich, Juliana Dias, and George N. Kiladis Role of the Tropics in State-Dependent Improvements of U.S. West Coast NOAA UFS Precipitation Forecasts
4:30pm	Ángel G. Muñoz (International Research Institute for Climate and Society) co-authors Andrew W. Robertson, Bohar Singh, and Drew Resnick Winter precipitation scenarios for the Western United States: bridging subseasonal and seasonal forecasts
4:50pm	Deanna Nash (University of California, Santa Barbara) co-authors William Scheftic, Alex Mitchell, Janak Joshi, Nikolaos Mastrantonas, Michael J. DeFlorio, Aneesh Subramanian, and Judith Berner Subseasonal predictions during the 2017 Oroville Dam Crisis: role of atmospheric rivers and antecedent synoptic conditions
	Session 3: New Forecasting Methodologies [Thursday, 17 March 2022 2:20pm-5:10pm EDT]
	Session 3 Vimeo recording HERE
	Session chairs: Xubin Zeng, Patrick Broxton
2:20pm	Michael J. DeFlorio (Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes) co-authors F. Martin Ralph, Duane E. Waliser, Michael L. Anderson, and Jeanine Jones Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) Research and Experimental Forecast Product Development at CW3E/NASA JPL
2:40pm	Agniv Sengupta (Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes) and co-author Duane E. Waliser Exploring an Evolution-Centric Statistical Technique for Improving Seasonal Precipitation Forecasts over the Western U.S.
3:00pm	Peter Gibson (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand)                                             Seasonal forecasting of Western US precipitation patterns with machine learning
3:20pm	[10 min break]
3:30pm	Soukayna Mouatadid, (Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto) co-authors Paulo Orenstein, Genevieve Flaspohler, Miruna Oprescu, Judah Cohen, Franklyn Wang, Sean Knight, Maria Geogdzhayeva, Sam Levang, Ernest Fraenkel, and Lester Mackey Adaptive Bias Correction for Improved Subseasonal Forecasting
3:50pm	William D. Scheftic (University of Arizona) co-authors Xubin Zeng and Patrick Broxton Hybrid two-stage seasonal forecasts of temperature, precipitation and snow mass over western U.S.
4:10pm	Alphan Altinok (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) co-authors Agniv Sengupta and Duane E. Waliser A Spatiotemporal Machine Learning Framework for S2S Precipitation Prediction over the Western U.S.
4:30pm	Final Discussion (40 mins)