A case study of excessive rainfall forecasting

Flash floods have been recognized as one of the most significant natural disaster problems in the world. Within the United States, the annual average flood death toll exceeds one hundred and property damage is on the order of a billion dollars. There has been an increased effort of the meteorological community to improve short term quantitative precipitation forecasting, principally by improving mesoscale numerical weather prediction for heavy rain events. Nevertheless, to date, numerical weather prediction has had rather limited impact on the prediction of the most damaging convective rainstorms. This study examines numerical experiments, including both coarse-mesh and fine-mesh model simulations, of the Enid, Oklahoma flood of 10-11 October 1973. Besides the great concentration of rainfall, the Enid flood was rather unique in comparison with ether flash flood cases in that it was part of a much larger area of heavy rainfall which soaked the central Plains over the 24h period ending at 1200 UTC 11 October. The objective is to assess the overall usefulness and limitation of numerical weather prediction models in quantitative precipitation forecasting for this flash flood event. The model experiments reveal that the broad-scale precipitation patterns associated with the front and cyclone are well predicted, but the maximum rainfall amounts around Enid are underpredicted. The fine-mesh model is superior to the coarse-mesh model because of the former's ability to generate many significant mesoscale features in the vicinity of the front. In the fine-mesh model, many convection-related parameters (e.g., moisture flux convergence) are correlated very well temporally and spatially with the observed heavy precipitation scenario.