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The archive can contribute to a number of tasks often encountered in water resources management. These include hindcasting (re-forecasting), forecast verification and (web) dissemination.
Hindcasting, sometimes referred to as re-forecasting, is the process of producing forecasts for times in the past, using only data that was available at the time. Reasons for hindcasting include testing of new models or other forecasting routine such as data assimilation or statistical post-processing. Hindcasting requires the availability of forcing data. In the case of hydrological forecasts, this includes weather forecasts that were available at the time. Every hindcast should then be forced by another weather forecast. Delft-FEWS is eminently suited to carry out these hindcast exercises, especially if connected to an OpenArchive. Within a hindcasting workflow, past weather forecasts are retrieved from the archive and used to force hydrological and/or hydrodynamic models.
Forecast verification is the process of establishing the quality of a set of forecasts. Often, these are compared to the 'verifying' observations. The record of forecasts needs to be available to the verification tools and one way of achieving this is through an OpenArchive. Indeed, one of the most often used forecast verification packages, the EVS, can source its data from an instance of the OpenArchive.
In realtime hydrological forecasting systems as well as in 'water information systems', forecasts are often disseminated to stakeholders via the web. One way to do this is by actively pushing data from a forecast production system to HTML pages or to locations from where the data is ingested by a web viewer. The OpenArchive, however, allows for web viewers to directly access the archive and visualize its data in a browser environment.
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