From ceginfo@u.washington.edu Tue Jul 9 14:10:38 2002 Received: from mailscan3.cac.washington.edu (mailscan3.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.15]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g69LAbNn012528 for ; Tue, 9 Jul 2002 14:10:37 -0700 Received: FROM mxu1.u.washington.edu BY mailscan3.cac.washington.edu ; Tue Jul 09 14:10:36 2002 -0700 Received: from mxout3.cac.washington.edu (mxout3.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.19]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.06) with ESMTP id g69LAaR9012681 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for ; Tue, 9 Jul 2002 14:10:36 -0700 Received: from mailscan-out2.cac.washington.edu (mailscan-out2.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.17]) by mxout3.cac.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.06) with SMTP id g69LAZYu019923 for ; Tue, 9 Jul 2002 14:10:36 -0700 Received: FROM homer41.u.washington.edu BY mailscan-out2.cac.washington.edu ; Tue Jul 09 14:10:34 2002 -0700 Received: from localhost (ceginfo@localhost) by homer41.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g69LAXSg131986; Tue, 9 Jul 2002 14:10:33 -0700 Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 14:10:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Civil and Environmental Engineering To: faculty@ce.washington.edu, , , Subject: General Exam for Andrew W. Wood Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII The General Exam for the Ph.D. for Andrew W. Wood will be held on Tuesday, July 16, 2002 at 1:00 in 154 Mueller. Seasonal Hydrologic Forecasting in the Western U.S. Andrew Wood Dissertation Proposal Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington ABSTRACT Great strides have been made over the last decade in understanding climate teleconnections and capturing this understanding in numerical climate models, with commensurate gains in seasonal forecasting of regional climate. Nonetheless, there is a relative dearth of research into direct applications of climate model forecasts in hydrology (e.g., hydrologic and streamflow forecasting). The need for such applications, with high potential benefit for water resources management, motivates the questions that this dissertation seeks to address. These are the following: (1) can a simple approach for using climate model forecast fields as hydrologic forecast inputs be designed that avoids climate model bias and downscales climate model outputs to scales of interest for hydrologic forecasting, while preserving climate forecast signals and capturing forecast information deriving from hydrologic persistence? (2) how would such an approach fare relative to more physically based (but computationally intensive) methods such as dynamical downscaling? and (3), when and where in the western U.S. would the approach improve current skill in forecasting streamflow and other hydrologic variables? Using an experimental approach in two separate test applications (for the U.S. East Coast in summer 2000, and the Pacific Northwest in summer 2001, a simple statistical method appears successful for downscaling climate model forecasts for use in hydrology. A separate analysis (for the Columbia River basin) shows that the approach offers comparable results to dynamical downscaling. On the strength of these results, the approach is proposed as a basis for hydrologic and streamflow forecasting throughout the western U.S. Professor Dennis P. Lettenmaier, Chair Professor Darlene Zabowski, GSR Professor Stephen J. Burges Professor Dennis L. Hartmann Dr. Arun Kumar, NOAA Professor Richard N. Palmer Marcia Buck Graduate Advising Office, More 201F Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering University of Washington Box 352700 Seattle, WA 98195-2700 (206) 543-2574 email: ceginfo@u.washington.edu .