Short Course on the Ensemble Framework For Flash Flood Forecasting (EF5)
Instructors
- Jonathan J. Gourley (NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory)
- Humberto Vergara (Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations - CIWRO)
Jorge Duarte (Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations - CIWRO)
Slides from the Short Course can be found HERE
Description
EF5 is a distributed hydrologic modeling framework that runs within the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system and utilizes the 2-min/1-km radar-only rainfall product. It has been transitioned to the U.S. National Weather Service where it runs operationally and supplies meaningful products to guide the issuance of flash flood warnings. This course will begin with a brief, conference-style overview of the modeling framework. Participants will then access the open-source modeling software, inputs from MRMS rainfall estimates, parameter maps, etc., to run simulations for an actual case of flash flooding. The model results will be displayed in QGIS and assessed using Local Storm Reports and other information they will retrieve online.
Prerequisites for the Workshop
If you plan to follow along the development of the workshop by running EF5 in your own machine, it is important to have the necessary resources available locally, since most of them are large downloads (adding up to around 2.8GB), and bandwidth may be limited at the time of the workshop. We highly recommend doing the following BEFORE the workshop begins:
- Download and install Docker Desktop in your machine (~600MB):
- Download a copy of (or clone) the containerized EF5 project from GitHub (~1.1 GB)
- Download and install QGIS - A Free and Open Source Geographic Information System (~1.1 GB)
You may refer to the containerized EF5 project's main page, where the Readme.md file provides more details on installing Docker Desktop and getting started with the EF5 container: https://github.com/babetoduarte/EF5-dockerized