A method for preferential selection of dates in the Schaake shuffle approach to constructing spatiotemporal forecast fields of temperature and precipitation

Abstract Hydrological forecasts strongly rely on predictions of precipitation amounts and temperature as meteorological forcings for hydrological models. Ensemble weather predictions provide a number of different scenarios that reflect the uncertainty about these meteorological inputs, but these are often biased and under‐dispersive, and therefore require statistical postprocessing. In addition to correcting the marginal distributions of the two weather variables, postprocessing methods must reconstruct their spatial, temporal, and intervariable dependence in order to generate physically realistic forecast trajectories that can be used as forcings of hydrological streamflow forecast models. For many years, a sample reordering method referred to as “Schaake shuffle” has been used successfully to address this multivariate aspect of forecast distributions by using historical observation trajectories as multivariate “dependence templates.” This paper proposes a variant of the Schaake shuffle, in which the historical dates are selected such that the marginal distributions of the corresponding observation trajectories are similar to the forecast marginal distributions, thus making it more likely that spatial and temporal gradients are preserved during the reordering procedure. This new approach is demonstrated with temperature and precipitation forecasts over four river basins in California, and it is shown to improve upon the standard Schaake shuffle both with respect to verification metrics applied to the forcings, and verification metrics applied to the resulting streamflow predictions.