World Meteorological Organization

This project will focus on the shorter time scales (minutes to days), and the advancement of warning strategies associated with multi-hazards and their interdependencies that affect the water cycle. The integrated precipitation-hydrology prediction problem builds on the goals of the WMO Vision and Strategy for Hydrology and its associated plan of Action to ensure that “nobody is surprised by a flood” and that communities are prepared for flooding events of different types, including fluvial/riverine floods, pluvial flooding, inland flooding through interaction with the built environment, freshwater flooding, coastal inundation, and mud or debris flows. Coupling the land and atmosphere (from nowcasting to short-range time scales) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models with the hydrological models would be crucial to advance and accurately initialize the precipitation and hydrological state, and to realistically represent the evolution of uncertainty through the coupled system. This work requires the significant improvement in remotely-sensed observations for precipitation estimation, the improvement of observations of the hydrological and soil moisture state, and continued support for ground-based networks for precipitation and stream flow.