Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE)

This record contains the final report, code and data for the S&T Project 22050: Evaluating Water Temperature Modeling and Prediction in the Sacramento River Basin. This project focused on assessing and identifying avenues to improve Reclamation’s current use of seasonal predictions of input meteorology in temperature modeling, along with several related investigations. To facilitate this effort, the current spreadsheet-based Local Three-Month Temperature Outlook (L3MTO) method was duplicated in a set of Python scripts. These scripts were used to explore and evaluate variations of the approach, as well as to assess its predictive skill and potential performance limits. In particular, the work showed that the temperature model input forecasts had mean monthly skill in the first lead month of the forecast. The work also indicated potential for improvement through further development of the input climate forecasts and using alternatives to the climate-conditioned deterministic analog selection method.