Description

The Streamflow Prediction Tool for the HKH river basins provides 10-day streamflow forecasts for major rivers within the Amu Darya, Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus basins in the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region. Each river segment displayed in the map is assigned a unique identifier. Users can click on a particular river segment to display 10-day streamflow forecasts for the river stretch.

This tool can be used as part of the decision support system for flood forecasting services and can assist decision makers and managers to provide flood early warnings and response during extreme events.

Each river segment displayed in the map interface is colour-coded daily to indicate streamflow in the segment with respect to flood return periods.

• Red indicates river flow > 100-year return period
• Brown indicates river flow > 50-year return period
• Orange indicates river flow > 25-year return period
• Yellow indicates river flow > 10-year return period
• Light blue indicates river flow > 5-year return period
• Blue indicates river flow > 2-year return period
• Dark Blue indicates river flow <= 2-year return period

Rivers with streamflow exceeding the threshold for higher return periods are likely to experience flooding.

The Streamflow Prediction Tool provides predicted estimates by using runoff predictions from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) routed through the Routing Application for Parallel Computation of Discharge (RAPID) model . The connection between the predicted and hind-casted runoffs is generated using different proprietary and open-source GIS tools.

The Streamflow Prediction Tool was developed at Brigham Young University (BYU) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). ICIMOD’s SERVIR Hindu Kush Himalaya (SERVIR-HKH) Initiative worked together with BYU to develop a customized Streamflow Prediction Tool for the region. The tool has been further customised for Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and HKH region

The tool is built on Tethys, an open-source framework for developing web-based applications for Earth observation. Observational data from selected stations are being used for forecast verification for national-level tools.

Analytical tools

The web application displays the following layers:

• Amu Darya Basin
• Brahmaputra Basin
• Ganges Basin
• Indus Basin

Users can view the following parameters upon clicking on any river stretch:

• Forecast (10-day): Forecast information is generated from 52 ensemble forecasts and shows the average, upper, and lower standard deviations; the maximum and minimum flows; and a single higher resolution forecast (black line). The references can be seen on the right, and the different layers can be turned on and off. The different background colours in the graph represent the flow magnitude between defined return periods.
• User can further interact with adjoining tabs to access the following information:
• Historical: This tab displays a graph of simulated historical flows from 1980.
• Flow-duration: This tab shows information on flow reliability.
• This tab allows users to download the forecast data and ERA-Interim data as a downloadable CSV file.