Ensemble Streamflow Forecasting becomes a well-established technique in operational (flood) forecasting centers to assess forecast uncertainty. Currently, these forecasts are communicated to decision makers; however, taking decisions is still up to the subjective experience of the specific stakeholder. Due to the large amount of information in ensemble forecasts, this task is a major challenge in particular when time is limited during ongoing flood events.
There is a lack of objective methods to take qualified decisions under consideration of forecast uncertainty. Whereas stochastic optimization techniques based on ensemble forecasts are applied in other water management domains (e.g. for scheduling hydropower assets), they are so far not used in the scope of flood forecasting and early warning systems. One major reason is probably the conceptual difficulty to integrate binary decisions (“Evacuate a region or not”) or logical constraints (“Measure A excludes measure B”) into the decision-making under consideration of forecast uncertainty.

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