Investigation of the Added Utility of Different SST products in
Prediction of Floods with WRF-Hydro Modeling System over Eastern Black
Sea and Mediterranean Regions
Abstract
In this study, the impact of integrating four different sea surface
temperatures (SST) datasets on the accuracy of the Weather Research and
Forecasting (WRF)-Hydro system to simulate hydrological response during
two catastrophic flood events triggered by the changes in SST is
investigated. The selected events occurred over Eastern Black Sea (EBS)
and Mediterranean (MED) regions of Turkey, where complex geographical
characteristics exist and flash flood occurrences are associated with
climatic conditions. Three time-varying and high-resolution external SST
products (GHRSST, Medspiration, and NCEP-SST) and one coarse-resolution
SST product (ECMWF-SST and GFS-SST for EBS and MED regions,
respectively) already embedded in the initial and boundary condition
dataset of WRF model are used in deriving near-surface weather variables
through WRF. Using these meteorological inputs, the flood hydrographs of
topographically complex small catchments located over EBS and MED
regions are derived by a calibrated WRF-Hydro model coupled one way with
WRF 3-km nest domain. After the proper event-based calibration performed
to the WRF-Hydro using hourly and daily streamflow data of small
catchments in both regions, model simulations for independent SST events
are conducted to assess the impact of SST-triggered precipitation on
simulated extreme runoff. The calibrated model over both regions
revealed significant improvement in flood hydrographs. Some localized
and temporal differences in the occurrence of the flood events with
respect to observations depending on the SST representation are
noticeable. The high-resolution SST dataset cases (Medspiration and
GHRSST) show error reduction up to 20% and increase in correlation from
0.3 to 0.8 with respect to the coarse SST in simulated runoffs of the
EBS region. The error reduction reached 35% after the calibration. The
same high-resolution SST data revealed the exact match with the observed
runoff peak after 100 m3/s reductions obtained with calibration in the
MED region.