Hydrology Workshop Highlights Water's Unpredictability

Perhaps the most ironic thing occurring during the National Weather Service’s hydrology workshop last week was that while scientists, conservation district reps, bureaucrats, meteorologists and hydrologist met on the inside, a flood advisory had been issued for a small region of Valley County only miles away on the outside. It was a small example of what the participants of the Glasgow and Billings Eastern Montana Hydrology Workshop were trying to accomplish.

The workshop was held at the Fort Peck Interpretive Center from Sept. 11 through 13 and was a way to introduce new ideas and tools, while building networks between those various stakeholders and water managers, explained Glasgow-based National Weather Service Meteorologist Brandon Bigelbach.

One key objective of the workshop was understanding how different agencies manage water as a resource and how they manage and plan for flood risks throughout the various agencies and stakeholders that control and use waters that flow into the Missouri or Yellowstone Rivers. For the Weather Service, one goal of the event was introducing the National Water Center based at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Ala. According to Bigelbach, the Water Center opened in 2015 and started for the first time providing product and information support in 2018 during Hurricane Florence.

He said the idea for the Water Center’s participation was to, “Spin up some of these ideas and products they want to produce and kind of be this data hub for entities such as the River Forecast Center and the Weather Service to glean guidance from, so they don’t want to be a full-blown forecast entity, but they want to be a data hub and put out products that guide their decision support.”

In simpler terms, Bigelbach stated they are more, “like a supplement rather than a replacement.”

The National Water Center is part of the Office of Water Prediction at the National Weather Service and, according to their mission statement, they were established to, “support decisions for a water-resilient nation. Scientists at the Center will collaboratively research, develop and deliver state-of-the-science national hydrologic analyses, forecast information, data, decision-support services and guidance to support and inform essential emergency services and high-value water management decisions.”

When fully operational ,the Center could house up to 200 personnel from agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States Geological Survey and FEMA as well as independent scientists and contractors. The Center’s primary goal is to provide intelligence and information to decision makers and forecast centers that will assist in decision making and prediction.

The Water Center aside, the National Weather Service in Glasgow and Billings had other objectives for the workshop as well. According to Bigelbach, “The main idea was to get all these different folks from all these different walks of employment and experience, with stakes in hydrology, in Eastern Montana, just to get us all together in the same room, to collaborate and to talk. To let everyone know what they are working on and what we are working on.”

The Weather Service hopes that the interactions and networking will help them better support their partners in the field who rely on timely and accurate information to make water use and storage decisions at reservoirs and dams along the watershed. But they also hope to get feedback to better serve the public with water prediction and management.

Bigelbach stated that better communication and feedback would let them do what they need to do better. He said, “We want to mitigate risk from flooding, protect lives and property and provide better watershed management, because that’s really important too, being able to take care of our ecosystem and take care of our watershed.”

In fact, for him, the biggest takeaway from the workshop was how to elicit reactions from the public when the Weather Service puts out a warning, watch or an advisory. That topic was the subject of one of the workshop’s presentations by Dr. Elizabeth Shanahan, an associate professor with the Political Science Department at Montana State University in Bozeman. According to Bigelbach, much of her presentation circled around a study performed on the Yellowstone River that answered the question of how to get people to better respond to public service information by framing it in the form of a narrative rather than as information.

Bigelbach stated, “That could really, really help us try to provide better decision support if we know how to craft our messages to be the most effective to get people to react. And, that is always what we’re about, right? We want people to take action when we put out something like a watch, warning or advisory. We are trying to get people to do something to protect themselves and their property.” He went on to say that if there is a better way to craft messages the NWS put out to the public then they definitely want to do that.