CEE Seminar: EF5 & Crowd Sourcing: Global & CONUS Applications

McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)
Zac Flamig

School of Meteorology, Ph.D. Candidate
University of Oklahoma 
Norman, Oklahoma

Abstract: This talk will explore the development of the Ensemble Framework for Flash Flood Forecasting (EF5). EF5 is a distributed hydrologic modeling framework combining water balance components such as the Variable Infiltration Curve (VIC) and Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting (SAC-SMA) with kinematic wave channel routing. EF5 also contains the Differential Evolution Adaptive Metropolis (DREAM) parameter estimation scheme for model calibration. Two applications of EF5 will be shown from the NOAA/NSSL Flooded Locations and Simulated Hydrographs (FLASH) project and efforts in establishing a global flood monitoring and prediction system. The FLASH system runs at 1-km2, 10-minute resolution for high-resolution flash flood forecasting across the CONUS. Initial results from an effort to derive a 10-year flash flood climatology based on FLASH will be shown.

This talk will also highlight the crowd-sourced weather reporting system Meteorological Phenomena Identification Near the Ground (mPING) showing how the data is collected, being used and future plans. mPING has collected over 900,000 reports so far with 70,000 iOS and Android app downloads.

Biography: Zac Flamig is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. He currently works with the NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies on improving NWS flash flood warnings. His research interests include hydrologic modeling at small scales over large domains, crowd sourced data collection, disaster response and radar meteorology. Zac holds a B.S. and M.S. in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma.