P48     Application of WRF-Hydro v5.0 for an operational, highly localized land surface and streamflow predictions in the Lake George, NY watershed.

Tewari, Mukul, Campbell D. Watson, IBM, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and Alvaro B. Buoro, IBM Research, Brazil

The Jefferson Project at Lake George, NY is a multi-year collaborative effort between IBM Research, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and The FUND for Lake George studying this fresh water lake.  A core component of the project is to develop a system capable of real-time observations and coupled modeling of the atmosphere, watershed hydrology and lake circulation and biology. The recent release of WRF-Hydro v5.0 has been implemented as one of the components of the coupled modeling framework for Lake George, operating at ~41m resolution.  The output has been compared to observations from a network of tributary sensors.  WRF-Hydro (in standalone mode) was forced with high-resolution WRF-ARW daily, 36-hour model-based forecasts at 333m horizontal resolution for the years of 2018 and 2019.  The results of this implementation have been evaluated in terms of both the use of manual calibration of several parameters, and the impact of several years of spin-up.  The effect of this manual calibration on the model performance for several extreme events in this region in 2018 and 2019 has been demonstrated.  A critical consideration in the design of the coupled-model system is for it to enable rapid deployment in other geographic settings.  Hence, it presents various challenges, including the automated deployment of a reliable stream network.  We will discuss the results to date and these on-going challenges for practical applications.