Operational Interactive Hydrologic Forecasting with the National Weather Service River Forecast System

by Donna Page, Natl Weather Service, Silver Spring, United States,
George F. Smith, Natl Weather Service, Silver Spring, United States,



Document Type: Proceeding Paper

Part of: Water Policy and Management: Solving the Problems

Abstract:

The National Weather Service River Forecast System (NWSRFS) consists of several major hydrometeorologic subcomponents to model the physics of the flow of water through the hydrologic cycle. The entire NWSRFS runs in both mainframe and minicomputer environments, using command oriented text input to control the system computations. As computationally powerful and graphically sophisticated scientific workstations became available, the National Weather Service (NWS) recognized that a graphically based, interactive environment would enhance the accuracy and timeliness of NWS river and flood forecasts. Consequently, the operational forecasting portion of the NWSRFS has been ported to run under a UNIX operating system, with X-windows as the display environment on a system of networked scientific workstations. In addition, the NWSRFS Interactive Forecast Program was developed to provide a graphical user interface to allow the forecaster to control NWSRFS program flow and to make adjustments to forecasts as necessary.

Subject Headings: Forecasting | Hydrologic models | Control systems | Interactive systems | Graphic methods | Water flow | River systems

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