South Africa – Department of Water Affairs and Forestry River Forecast System

South Africa’s Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) operates the country’s reservoirs for power generation and flood control. DWAF critically needs forecasts of inflows into the reservoirs to optimize power generation and to save lives and property in times of floods.

Riverside Technology, inc. (RTi) has been working under contract to the National Weather Service (NWS) to develop a river forecasting system for South Africa’s DWAF, using the NWS River Forecast System (NWSRFS). In the first phase of the project RTi provided DWAF with a functional prototype of the river forecast system for South Africa’s Vaal River upstream from the Vaal Dam. The purpose of the prototype was to demonstrate to DWAF the potential uses of an interactive forecasting system predicting reservoir inflows.

In the second phase of the project, RTi personnel visited the DWAF offices to update model parameters in the prototype and to provide additional training on system setup and operation. With updated model parameters, the system became more useful and produced more realistic results. In the project’s third phase, DWAF personnel spent three weeks in RTi offices for intensive hands–on training in NWSRFS data analysis, model calibration, and system implementation. During that time, the DWAF forecast system was expanded from just the Upper Vaal River, to include the Middle and Lower Vaal River Basins, and the portion of the Orange River upstream of its confluence with the Vaal. Working with DWAF staff, RTi fine–tuned model parameters for the Upper Vaal, and established regional parameter sets for the remaining basins. Later, RTi personnel returned to South Africa to complete the initialization on the Vaal–Orange system, to implement Ensemble Streamflow Prediction on the entire system, and to provide additional advanced NWSRFS training. RTi plans to continue working with DWAF in the future to extend the forecast system to the remainder of the Orange River and other basins within South Africa and extending across the border.

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