Hydrological forecasting at EGU 2016

Next Sunday, attendees from all over the world will start to arrive in Vienna and get prepared for the week-long annual event organized by the European Geosciences Union.

EGU2016 will take place from 17–22 April 2016 and, as in every year, there will be several scientific sessions of interest to the hydrological forecasting community. The program of the Hydrological Forecasting Sub-division of the Division on Hydrological Sciences is rich of about 200 contributions that will be presented as oral, poster and PICO presentations along 8 scientific sessions.

Here you find some guidance to help you find the sessions related to forecasting and see who is presenting what in Vienna:

There is a lot to see already on the first day of the conference:

• 08:30–10:00 / Room 2.95: Flash floods and associated hydro-geomorphic processes – Flash flood monitoring, forecasting and warning is at the heart of this session, with presentations focusing, this year, on urban areas, ungauged sites and impact-damage analyses from recent events observed in 2015, such as the 2-3 November flood in Spain or the 15 October flood in France.

Just a short break for coffee and back to the same room for six more oral presentations before lunch:

• 10:30–12:00 / Room 2.95: Predictability and predictive uncertainty estimation in hydrologic forecasting – From El Niño-Flood Predictability to hourly typhoon rainfall, a lot of discussion is expected around the quantification of uncertainty at different scales and applications (check, for instance, the talk on the “escalation” of the model uncertainty proposed by D. Solomatine).
  

At lunch time, we will have the Hydrological Forecasting Sub-Division Meeting: 12:15–13:15 / Room 2.17 It’s free and open to everybody interested in learning more about how the hydrological forecasting sessions are organized at EGU. In the agenda: feedback from the organization of the sessions in 2016, plans for next year, news from HEPEX, etc. If you are not coming to Vienna but want to leave a message to the group, just add a comment to this post or contact me.

In the afternoon, more oral presentations are planned and, for the 5th consecutive year, a game is proposed:

• 13:30–15:00 / Room 2.95: Advances in Sensitivity and Uncertainty Analysis – Keep on learning more about recent advances on uncertainty and sensitivity analysis with this session proposed by the  “General Hydrology” programme.

Another short break for coffee and back to the same room:

• 15:30–17:00 / Room 2.95: Ensemble hydro-meteorological forecasting – Ensemble-based forecasting systems from all over the world and decision-making issues focusing several sectors are the main topics of the presentations here. If you think you are going to get tired of so many talks, well, I am sure this will not happen, but, just in case, you can find a nice way to relax while playing a game. Presented by Micha Werner, you are invited to make decisions under uncertainty: How sure must one be? That’s the question this year! Make sure to be in the room on time to play it.

If you played last year’s game (or also if you didn’t), you may be curious to learn more about the results that Louise Arnal will show in the poster A.189. You can also check the paper submitted to the HESS journal here. All games promoted by HEPEX can be freely downloaded from the Resources page.

On Monday, there is also a poster about HEPEX (A.194): a traditional “meeting point” for the forecasting community at EGU. Another tradition is the HEPEX social meeting @ EGU. This year, it will take place on Wednesday evening. Come to the poster and contact Hannah Cloke, Liz Stephens or myself for more details if you want to join us.

POSTER SESSION 17:30–19:00 / Hall A: poster presenters will be glad to talk to you. Come and enjoy relaxed discussions at the end of the day!

On the next day, two large forecasting sessions are scheduled:

• 08:30–12:00 / Room 2.95: Drought and water scarcity – Starting with two talks to present the European 2015 drought from a climatological and a hydrological perspective, respectively, several works will follow on drought indicators, impact analyses, the economic value of drought information and the forecasting of droughts.
  

A break for lunch, and here we go with the PICO session of the Hydrological Forecasting sub-division:

• 13:30–17:00/ PICO spot 1: Operational forecasting and warning systems for natural hazards – Here we will have 24 presentations of 2 min each on operational systems, followed by time to discuss in front of a screen and with the authors. If you ever dreamt about running your models and your forecasts operationally, this is the place to go on Tuesday afternoon. See how easy (or challenging!) operations can be.
  

POSTER SESSION 17:30–19:00 / Hall A: at the end of the day, posters from the Drought and water scarcity session will be displayed (check the list here).

One more day of sessions organized and co-organized by the Hydrological Forecasting sub-division:

• 08:30–10:00 / Room 0.49: Servicing Water Users by forecasting, outlooks and climate projections for water services – Two Horizon 2020 projects (BINGO and IMPREX) joined their efforts to put together this new session in 2016. The aim is to discuss sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescales, climate services and  user-specific information on impacts, based on weather forecasts and climate projections. A nice way to get information on these just-starting projects.
  
• At the same time 08:30–10:00 / Room 2.61, a co-organized session will take place: Coupled atmosphere-hydrological modeling for improved hydro-meteorological predictions – Coupling meteorological and hydrologic modelling approaches is a hot topic at the moment, as shown by recent posts in this HEPEX blog, so join the session to see what is going on.

A nice break for a well-deserved coffee and then back to attend sessions from other sub-divisions of the Hydrological Sciences (check here), before you head to the last co-organized session of the Hydrological Forecasting sub-division:

• 15:30–17:00 / Room 2.16: Advances in statistical post-processing for deterministic and ensemble forecasts – Don’t be afraid of statistics or post-processors of model outputs! Spatial ensemble and multi-variate post-processing will no longer hold any secrets for you after this session.

POSTER SESSION 17:30–19:00 / Hall A: poster presenters of the Wednesday sessions will be there. Come and join the group to meet new people and chat with old colleagues!

There’s much more of EGU on Thursday and Friday. Just check the Hydrological Sciences (HS) programme here.  Also, don’t forget the HS Division Meeting convened by Elena Toth on Thursday, 21 Apr, 12:15–13:15 / Room B.

See you very soon in Vienna!