National Weather Service River Forecast Center

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ABRFC Forecast Precipitation

Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts (QPF) are predictions of precipitation amounts over an area. The ABRFC normally creates QPF forecasts for the Arkansas-Red Basin three times a day (00z, 12z, and 18z). The ABRFC also creates an additional QPF forecast at 06Z, when staffed overnight for flooding. Six-hour increments for the next 24 hour period are used as an input into the ABRFC hydrologic model. Due to the limitations of precipitation forecasting, the ABRFC only uses 12 hours of QPF for forecasting river stages.

First 6-Hour Period Third 6-Hour Period	Second 6-Hour Period Fourth 6-Hour Period
12-hour Totals	24-hour Totals

Downloading ABRFC QPF:

ABRFC QPF is output in two forms: GIF images for viewing and netCDF files for research and other projects.

Recent QPF is available via FTP. Please email the ABRFC for more information and instructions.

QPF older than a few days can also be found in the ABRFC Archives. The naming conventions used in the archive are as follows:

PP_YYYYMMDDHHfhhh.xxx


• PP is the increment -- 6 or 24
• YYYYMMDDHH is the run date. For example, 2002041512 is the 12z qpf from April 15, 2002.
• hhh is the ending period. For 24-hour QPF, hhh is always 024. For 6-hour QPF, hhh can be 006 (period 1), 012 (period 2), 018 (period 3) or 024 (period 4).
• xxx is the file type -- GIF image (.gif) or compressed netCDF (.nc.gz)