HEPEX Advances and Applications at MODSIM

At the 23rd International Congress on Modelling and Simulation (MODSIM2019), from 1-6 December 2019 in Canberra, Australia, a HEPEX session highlighted recent work in hydrometeorological forecasting. Seline Ng from CSIRO discusses HEPEX highlights from MODSIM2019:

We are glad to report that our session titled “Advances and applications in hydrometeorological forecasting” at the recent MODSIM2019 conference in Canberra, Australia went well, with a strong showing by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), CSIRO Land & Water and University of Melbourne. Ours was among the largest sessions, with 16 oral presentations and 4 posters, including several from overseas.

See the conference programme here for a list of all the presentations. Search under session K13 on Thursday, 5 December 2019.

A highlight was the keynote by HEPEX co-chair QJ Wang from the University of Melbourne. QJ presented on a new seasonally coherent calibration method for processing short-term numerical weather predictions of rainfall. The method is capable of making use of long archived observations to better estimate the seasonal climatology of rainfall observations.

In her invited talk, Deryn Griffiths of BOM described several measures of forecast verification. She showed why one measure can be insufficient and how consideration of various measures was key in improving BOM’s rainfall forecasts.

In another invited talk, Katayoon Bahramian of the University of Melbourne spoke of a probabilistic event-based framework for real-time operational flood forecasting. The framework incorporates ensemble forecasts and sequential updating to improve the forecast accuracy and reliability.

The presentations were all excellent and led to many interesting discussions. They provided a valuable platform for knowledge exchange between researchers and practitioners. We look forward to more at the next MODSIM, which will be in Sydney in 2021.