Improving Flood Forecasting in Thailand: Radar Rainfall Estimation, Distributed Hydrological Models, and State Updating

Project: PhD

Project Details

Description

This research aims to improve flood forecasting by enhancing the entire state estimation of the hydrological forecasting chain. To achieve the goal of this study, three strategies will be conducted as follows. The first is to improve rainfall input, as it is crucial for hydrological simulation, by using data from weather radars. Machine learning and empirical methods for radar rainfall estimation will be investigated to provide better rainfall estimates. The second is a modeling approach, as the existing system uses a conceptual lumped hydrologic model (NAM) to translate precipitation to runoff, which usually does not perform well when the spatial variation of catchment properties is high. The distributed hydrological model wflow_sbm will be set up and validated and used to take advantage of spatial data (from weather radar, numerical weather prediction) and deal with the high spatial variation in, among other, rainfall, topography and land use in Thailand. The third approach is to adopt data assimilation techniques to enhance the hydrological model states, which also contributes some improvement to the forecast discharge. Furthermore, this study will explore the possibility of improving the assimilation process using machine learning techniques in terms of efficiency or performance when implemented in the operational system. To test the approach, this study will focus on the Ping River basin, the largest tributary of the Chao Phraya River.
StatusActive
Effective start/end date1/05/24 → …

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