Flood Prediction: Operational Hydrological Forecast with the Cetemps Hydrological Model (CHyM)

Abstract

Hydrological forecasting is becoming increasingly important in the context of climate change impact assessment on people safety, economy, ecosystems and social sciences.Extreme weather events connected with water availability are becoming more frequent and predictions of hydrological phenomena deals with civil protection activities, as well as water management programs.Recently, regulation concerning the organization of the Civil Protection distributed Service strongly reiterates the role of the scientific community, as part of the system.Scientists are called to make innovative products available to end-users.From a technical point of view, the calibration of hydrological models over the Italian territory is challenging, due to its orographic and geomorphologic complexity and reduced historical hydrological time series availability, which are inhomogeneous among different Regions and catchments.Moreover, smallest basins, mainly located in Central and Southern Italy, requires higher horizontal resolution to be adequately resolved and high concentration of meteorological datasets, as well as high resolution meteorological forecasts.Meeting all those criteria deals with computational resources availability and a variety of end-users requirements in terms of hydrological simulation updating time and graphical representation.The WMO recommends that sample products should be readily available for potential customers.Starting from the positive outcome of many national and European projects the Centre of Excellence CETEMPS has developed its own experimental hydrological automatic forecasting system, the first, freely accessible online, to release daily hydrological stress deterministic simulations over the whole Italian territory.