Sensitivity of energy budget and temperature-index snow models to data uncertainties

Victor Koren
CNWS Office of Hydrological Development

Abstract:

Recently NWS offices are using a temperature-index snow model in river flood prediction. While overall performance of this type of model is reasonable, it can fail in unusual weather condition. One of the possibility for the improvement may be transition to more physically sound energy budget models. Question is if available operational input data to drive the model have a reasonable level of the accuracy to support river flood prediction. This presentation focuses on this question. Comprehensive tests were performed with NCEP energy model and NWS index-type model to analyze their sensitivity to noisy data, and to quantify model errors to data uncertainty.