Hydrological application of radar rainfall nowcasting in the Netherlands

Accurate and robust short-term rainfall forecasts (nowcasts) are useful in operational flood forecasting. However, the high temporal and spatial variability of rainfall fields make rainfall nowcasting a challenging endeavour. To cope with this variability, nowcasting techniques based on weather radar imagery have been proposed. Here, we employ radar rainfall nowcasting for discharge predictions in three lowland catchments in the Netherlands, with surface areas ranging from 6.5 to 957 km2. Deterministic (Lagrangian persistence) and probabilistic (SBMcast) nowcasting techniques are used to produ... Mehr ...