Towards improved post‐processing of hydrologic forecast ensembles

Abstract Forecast ensembles of hydrological and hydrometeorologial variables are prone to various uncertainties arising from climatology, model structure and parameters, and initial conditions at the forecast date. Post‐processing methods are usually applied to adjust the mean and variance of the ensemble without any knowledge about the uncertainty sources. This study initially addresses the drawbacks of a commonly used statistical technique, quantile mapping (QM), in bias correction of hydrologic forecasts. Then, an auxiliary variable, the failure index ( γ ), is proposed to estimate the ineffectiveness of the post‐processing method based on the agreement of adjusted forecasts with corresponding observations during an analysis period prior to the forecast date. An alternative post‐processor based on copula functions is then introduced such that marginal distributions of observations and model simulations are combined to create a multivariate joint distribution. A set of 2500 hypothetical forecast ensembles with parametric marginal distributions of simulated and observed variables are post‐processed with both QM and the proposed multivariate post‐processor. Deterministic forecast skills show that the proposed copula‐based post‐processing is more effective than the QM method in improving the forecasts. It is found that the performance of QM is highly correlated with the failure index, unlike the multivariate post‐processor. In probabilistic metrics, the proposed multivariate post‐processor generally outperforms QM. Further evaluation of techniques is conducted for river flow forecast of Sprague River basin in southern Oregon. Results show that the multivariate post‐processor performs better than the QM technique; it reduces the ensemble spread and is a more reliable approach for improving the forecast. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.