S2S Water Workshop 2022

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

DateMarch 15-17, 2022
VenueVirtual (Zoom), three 3-hour online sessions, 2:00-5:10pm EDT (18:00-21:10 UTC)
AgendaLink to Agenda
Target AudienceCimate researchers and forecasters, hydrologists, water managers
Organizing CommitteeA.W. Robertson and B. Singh/IRI, X. Zeng/U.Az, M. DeFlorio/CW3E/Scripps, D.Waliser/JPL, A. Lam-Wright/IRI
Contacts2s-water-2022@iri.columbia.edu
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
2:00pmWelcome: Andrew Robertson (IRI, Columbia University) and Duane Waliser (JPL, California Institute of Technology, NASA)
2:05pm Bradley Doorn (NASA)
2:15pmJeanine Jones, (California Department of Water Resources)
S2S Precipitation Forecasting to Support Drought Preparedness
2:40pmDave DeWitt (NOAA Climate Prediction Center)
Past, Present, and Future of Sub-Seasonal to Seasonal (S2S) Precipitation Forecasting
3:05pmCary 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]
3:40pmJohn Lhotak (NOAA Colorado Basin River Forecast Center)
Challenges with Applying S2S Forecasts in Hydrologic Modeling
4:05pmBohumil Svoma (Salt River Project)
S2S Weather Forecasts and Seasonal Streamflow Forecasting in Central Arizona
4:30pmKenneth Nowak (US Bureau of Reclamation)
Further evaluation of the S2S Rodeo winning AI methods
4:55pmDiscussion (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
2:00pmBohar 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
2:20pmZhenhai 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.
2:40pmWei 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
3:00pmXianan 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]
3:30pmEmerson LaJoie (NOAA Federal, Climate Prediction Center)
CPC’s Experimental Water Year Outlook Tool
3:50pmJiabao 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
4:10pmWei-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
4:30pmÁngel 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
4:50pmDeanna 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
2:20pmMichael 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
2:40pmAgniv 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.
3:00pmPeter 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]
3:30pmSoukayna 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
3:50pmWilliam 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.
4:10pmAlphan 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.
4:30pmFinal Discussion (40 mins)