Modeling hydrology to support flood forecasting for the Lake Champlain basin using WRF-Hydro

Session: Hydraulics, Hydrology, and Human Interactions in the Lake Champlain/Richelieu River Basin

Lacey Mason, NOAA-GLERL, [email protected]
Chuliang Xiao, [email protected]
Andrew Gronewold, University of Michigan, [email protected]
Laura Read, [email protected]
Kevin Sampson, NCAR, [email protected]
Dmitry Beletsky, CIGLR, SEAS, University of Michigan, [email protected]
Jesse Feyen, GLERL, [email protected]
Philip Chu, NOAA/GLERL, [email protected]

Abstract

In 2011, Lake Champlain experienced record setting snow melt and heavy spring rains which caused the lake to rise above flood stage for 67 days.  This extreme event impacted citizens of both the U.S. and Canada within this binational basin and highlighted the need to develop a advanced flood forecasting system that integrates hydrologic and lake hydrodynamic models.  To support the development of a hydrologic model for the basin, we leveraged the National Water Model configuration of the WRF-Hydro model. We developed two hydrographic datasets at different scales built from the NHDPlus High Resolution (1:24,000) and the NHDPlus V2.1 (1:100,000).  Using these “hydro-fabrics”, retrospective model simulations were conducted using precipitation forcings from North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS-2) and Canadian Precipitation Analysis (CaPA) products. In the future we plan to include streamflow from WRF-Hydro simulations into an FVCOM-based lake hydrodynamic model to create a more advanced flood forecasting system for the Lake Champlain basin.