Weather and seasonal climate prediction for flood planning in the Yangtze River Basin

Abstract This paper describes the use of numerical weather and climate models for predicting severe rainfall anomalies over the Yangtze River Basin (YRB) from several days to several months in advance. Such pre-dictions are extremely valuable, allowing time for pro-active flood protection measures to be taken. Specifically, the dynamical climate prediction system (IAP DCP-II), developed by the Institute of Atmo-spheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAP), is applied to YRB rainfall prediction and flood planning. IAP DCP-II employs ensemble prediction with dynam-ically conditioned perturbations to reduce the uncer-tainty associated with seasonal climate prediction. IAP DCP-II was shown to successfully predict seasonal YRB summer flooding events based on a 15-year (1980–1994) hindcast experiment and the real-time prediction of two summer flooding events (1999 and 2001). Finally, chal-lenges and opportunities for applying seasonal dynami-cal forecasting to flood management problems in the YRB are discussed