Achievements

• Infrastructure development. A strong infrastructure has been set up within Bangladesh to facilitate the development of flood forecasting schemes and their application. A Steering Committee, consisting of Disaster Management Bureau (DMB)/MFDM, Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE), Flood Forecasting and Warning Center (FFWC), Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD), Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), Institute of Water Modeling (IWM), ADPC, and CARE-Bangladesh was formed. The Steering Committee meets regularly to guide project implementation. At the international level, collaboration has been forged by the PAOS at the University of Colorado and the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for sharing of forecast products.

• Testing of long-term (1-6 months) forecast schemes. Historical data were used to initialize the long-range flood forecasting scheme. Results of the test indicate that major flood years could be predicted months before their occurrence. For example, the 1998 floods would have been predicted three months before their occurrence and hence giving sufficient lead time for anticipatory actions.

• Development of new medium-term (20-25 days) forecast scheme. A new statistical scheme for the prediction of rainfall and river discharge into Bangladesh has been developed, providing potential application for disaster management, particularly for the management of floods and drought.

• Establishment of skill of short-term (1-6 days) flood forecasts. The project has showed that short-term forecast can be extended from the current 2 days to nearly 8 days. This increase in lead time will allow emergency planning and selective planting or harvesting to reduce potential crop losses at the beginning or end of the cropping cycle.

• Forecast application. A method to bridge the gap between producers and users of probabilistic forecasts has been developed through the generation of a User Metric – a tool that provides an aggregated risk analysis to aid user community in making absolute decisions, e.g. whether to harvest early to obtain 80% of the potential yield or wait for two weeks for 100% yield or entirely lose the harvest.

• Delivery of experimental forecast during the summer monsoon 2003. The project performed and validated experimental real-time long, medium, and short-term forecasts of river discharge into Bangladesh for the summer of 2003.