About
The BuPuSa Basins Flood and Drought Monitor is an operational system for early warning of flood and drought conditions across the country. It has been developed by Princeton Climate Institute (PCI) in collaboration with University of Southampton and Princeton University, with funding support from UNESCO Intergovernmental Hydrology Programme (IHP) and US Army Corps of Engineers. The system is based on a set of ground, satellite and modeled datasets, which are combined to provide a consistent picture of hydrological conditions close to real-time, as well as forecasts out to 9-days for floods.
The system is operational and is updated every day, about 6-12 hours behind real-time. It runs a hydrological model at 30m resolution that is forced by a hybrid reanalysis-satellite dataset of precipitation and temperature. The model runoff is routed through a vector river model to produce estimates of streamflow at 1000’s of river reaches across the domain. The model outputs are used to calculate flood and drought indices, which are also updated every day. Every day an ensemble of short-term forecasts is made of precipitation and temperature, which are used to drive the hydrological model out to 9 days into the future. Currently the system uses the GEFS forecast system to produce the precipitation and temperature forecasts, and has 21 ensemble members. The precipitation and temperature data are downscaled to 5km resolution and bias-corrected to remove any biases from the weather forecast model. The hydrological model outputs are used to calculate forecasts of flood and drought indices and other statistics such as probability of flood. The forecast ensemble is represented by the mean and some other statistics of its distribution such as the 5th and 95th percentile.
Help
The main tab of the BUPUSA-FDM provides visualization and access to the data of the monitor. The top bar shows the name of the system and a menu with a series of tabs. The tabs provide access to the different parts of the BUPUSA-FDM. This includes tabs for current conditions, short-term forecasts, help, etc.
Current Conditions – This tab shows a summary of current conditions and the latest forecast.
Current Warnings – This tab shows a summary of current warnings for the next 9 days of the forecast.
District Summary - This analysis tab shows detailed information on current and short-term (9-day) forecast conditions, with a focus on hydrological variables at district scale, and streamflow at a series of points of interest.
About/help – this provides background information about the BUPUSA-FDM, as well as help information on the system and its various functions.
The following varibales and indices are included in the system: