Short Term Forecast Projects
RealPEP
Near-Realtime Quantitative Precipitation Estimation and Prediction
Near-realtime quantitative precipitation estimation is of high importance for applications in meteorology, hydrology, agriculture, construction, water and sewer system management. Area-covering polarimetric weather radars provide the undisputed core information for quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) and quantitative precipitation nowcasting (QPN). RealPEP will advance QPE/QPN to verifiably outperform rain gauge observations when employed for flood predictions in small to medium-sized catchments. To this goal radar polarimetry will be combined with attenuation estimates from commercial microwave link networks for QPE improvement. In addition, information on convection initiation and evolution from satellites and lightning counts from surface networks will be exploited for QPN improvement. With increasing forecast horizons the predictive power of observation-based nowcasting quickly deteriorates and is outperformed by Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) based on data assimilation, which fails, however, for the first hours due to the lead time required for model integration and spin-up. RealPEP will merge observation-based QPN with NWP towards seamless prediction in order to provide optimal forecasts of surface precipitation from the time of observation to days ahead.
