Abstract ID: 082
Sub-seasonal ensemble irrigation forecasts in Emilia-Romagna
Lead Author: Valentina Pavan
Arpae-Simc, Italy
Keywords: Irrigation, precipitation, water management, ensemble predictions
Abstract: ARPAE Simc set up an operational climate service addressed to irrigation water management in agriculture, conceived to provide mid-term information of probabilistic seasonal forecasts and the short-term view of deterministic +7-day forecasts.
Within the Highlander project, a new climatological product has been developed by ECMWF: sub-seasonal ecPoint downscaled ensemble forecasts of daily total precipitation and daily minimum, maximum and mean 2m temperatures, referring to the third and fourth weeks of the forecast (days from +16 to +30). This data integrates the ECMWF high resolution ensemble forecast from day +1 to +15.
Therefore, sub-seasonal (+4 weeks) forecasts have been nested in the existing operational chain of the climate service in order to produce subseasonal irrigation forecasts. The computational scheme includes the combination of different data sources: information on agricultural land use from satellite data, soil map, observed weather data and the downscaled sub-seasonal forecasts. These data are inputs for the agro-hydrological model CRITERIA-1D (https://github.com/ARPA-SIMC/CRITERIA1D), that computed the crop development and crop water needs.
The sub-seasonal irrigation forecasts are operationally produced for three Land Reclamation and Irrigation Boards (Consorzi di Bonifica in Italian), which are the authorities in charge of water management for agriculture (water storage, transportation and distribution): the Burana, Renana and Romagna Irrigation Consortia.
Output data are +4 weeks irrigation and precipitation forecasts expressed as a statistical distribution, of which 5th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th percentiles are available. The delivery of the forecast is weekly (usually on Tuesday) according to the emission of downscaled sub-seasonal forecasts produced by ECMWF. The service is available since June 2021 on the Highlander Data Delivery System (https://dds.highlanderproject.eu/app/applications/ crop-water); validation results regarding years 2021 and 2022 will be presented.
Co-authors:
Giulia Villani (Arpae-Simc)
Fausto Tomei (Arpae-Simc)
Alessandro Pirola (Arpae-Simc)
