Data Assimilation and Fusion for Operational NextGen NWM: An Enhanced Hydrologic Forecasting Framework

The operational forecasting systems currently used in the United States, integrate Data Assimilation (DA) techniques with numerical weather models to improve meteorological forecasts. The growing access to the earth and environmental remote sensing datasets has provided a great opportunity to enhance the forecasting skill of operational forecast systems by including a DA-hydrologic modeling framework in these systems. The NOAA-NWS Office of Water Prediction (OWP) has started the development of the NextGen National Water Model and aims to implement it operationally by FY 2024. The main goal of this project is to enhance the forecasting skill of US operational forecast systems by incorporating DA techniques into the NextGen framework. One of the main contributions of this study is to develop a novel precipitation product that combines different precipitation datasets and generates more accurate results for hydrologic modeling. We utilize this product within our proposed DA framework and assimilate remotely sensed satellite data and point source gauge measurements into the hydrologic models within the NextGen framework.