15 April 2014

WRaH 2014 : RainGain partners present a study on weather radar for urban hydrology in North-Western Europe

by TU Delft

From the 7th to the 10th of April, the Weather Radar and Hydrology conference was organized in Washington DC. The conference included two sessions on Weather Radar Applications in Urban Areas, an emerging topic at the conference. Speakers of the RainGain team contributed to both sessions with presentations on radar rainfall data merging, high resolution rainfall forecasting, fractal analysis.
 
joint study was presented on the same occasion. The research work investigates the impact of rainfall estimates of different spatial resolutions on the hydraulic outputs of the models of four of the EU RainGain project’s pilot locations. The present study will soon be extended to more storms as well as model structures and resolutions, with the final aim of identifying critical spatial-temporal resolutions for urban catchment modelling in relation to catchment and storm event characteristics. The full paper is available here.
Katie Norman from the MET Office presenting a poster on « A wind drift correction for radar rainfall products » (source : WRaH2014).

Other presentations at WraH 2014 included the Dallas-Fortworth Demonstration network, multi-sensor rainfall observation systems and progress on rainfall forecasting for convective storms. The symposium program included short courses on radar rainfall estimation and gridded data for hydrological modelling and a special lecture on rainfall derived from polarimetric radar. The program concluded with a lively panel discussion on the future of quantitative precipitation estimate and forecast and hydrologic flood forecasting. High-resolution estimates and forecasts for urban applications came out as one of the important topics for future research and development. We will no doubt see a lot of innovations in this field at the next symposium on Weather Radar and Hydrology that will be organised in 2017 in Malaysia.