Bridging the gap between operational meteorology and hydrology: Including hydrological forecasts into the WMO Integrated Processing and Prediction System (WIPPS/GDPFS)

The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Global Data-processing and Forecasting System (GDPFS) is an international network of global, regional, and national centres that make meteorological analysis and forecast products operationally available. GDPFS has strengthened the capabilities of countries to meet the needs of users by sharing Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) products and services related to operational meteorology, climate, and application fields in all timescales.

Advances in supercomputing and science over the last decade have furthered environmental predictions and probabilistic forecasts. Larger ensembles of NWP with increased horizontal and vertical resolutions are generated across all time scales. These developments clearly indicate the potential to evolve GDPFS to the WMO Integrated Processing and Prediction System (WIPPS) from its current form to a seamless platform, covering predictions for all time scales from minutes to centuries and encapsulating everything known about the Earth system which involves the atmosphere, ocean, hydrosphere, and cryosphere, along with all the interconnections and feedbacks among them.

As part of the Earth system approach, a few activities relevant to marine meteorology and oceanography have been already developed.  Further expanding the area of WIPPS, following hydrological activities are being established:

• Sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) hydrological predictions
• Snow cover predictions
• Flash flood forecasting

The authors will present the draft idea of the concept and the expected benefits of bridging the gap between operational meteorological and hydrology as part of an integrated processing and prediction system and show the ways on how experts can contribute to the evolution of WIPPS under the framework of WMO. Hydrological and meteorological communities can benefit significantly from the improved coupling between the NWP and hydrological models as for example the predicted precipitation reflecting realistic soil moisture contributes to predicting more accurate soil moisture and discharge. This is especially the case for short time scales (flash floods), S2S times scales as well as for snow cover considering nonstationary boundary conditions through a changing climate. Through its thematic focus on weather, water and climate and the strengths of centres of WMO Members to run operational prediction system, WIPPS offers the possibility to bridge the gap of operational services/systems between meteorology, hydrology and climatology and provides the opportunity for researchers to collaborate with operational practitioners and National Meteorological and Hydrology Services (NMHS). Questions like, what are the needs of scientists and practitioners, what are the bottlenecks, what are the best ways of collaboration and how can WMO develop the framework for a transdisciplinary effort to improve operational Earth system prediction systems for meteorology, climatology, and hydrology, can be discussed during the session to accelerate future cooperation.