The very short-term rainfall forecasting for a mountainous watershed by means of an ensemble numerical weather prediction system in Taiwan

During typhoons, accurate forecasts of rainfall are always desired for various kinds of disaster warning systems to reduce the impact of rainfall-induced disasters. However, rainfall forecasting, especially the very short-term (hourly) rainfall, is one of the most difficult tasks in hydrology due to the high variability in space and time and the complex physical process. In this study, the purpose is to provide effective forecasts of very short-term rainfall by means of the ensemble numerical weather prediction system in Taiwan. To this end, the ensemble forecasts of hourly rainfall from this ensemble numerical weather prediction system are analyzed to evaluate the performance. Furthermore, a methodology, which is based on the principle of analogue prediction, is proposed to effectively process these ensemble forecasts for improving the performance on very short-term rainfall forecasting. To clearly demonstrate the advantage of the proposed methodology, actual application is conducted on a mountainous watershed to yield 1- to 6-h ahead forecasts during typhoon events. The results indicate that the proposed methodology is better performed and more flexible than the conventional one. Generally, the proposed methodology provides improved performance for very short-term rainfall forecasting, especially for 1- to 2-h ahead forecasting. The improved forecasts provided by the proposed methodology are expected to be useful to support disaster warning systems, such as flash-flood, landslide, and debris flow warning systems, during typhoons. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.