RODEO II: SUB-SEASONAL CLIMATE FORECASTING

Welcome to the Forecasting Rodeo 2 Challenge Series!

We are excited to be working with the US Bureau of Reclamation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on this Rodeo II Challenge series! This series will have more than $800,000 in prize money available over the next year.

Why This Matters

Water managers need more skillful information on weather and climate conditions in order to help efficiently utilize water resources to reduce the impact of hydrologic regimes. Examples of hydrologic regimes include the onset of drought or wet weather extremes from high levels of precipitation. Lacking skillful sub-seasonal information limits water managers’ ability to prepare for shifts in hydrologic regimes and can pose major threats to their ability to manage the valuable resource.

The challenge of sub-seasonal forecasting is that it encompasses the time frame where initial state information (e.g., coupled land-atmosphere processes) becomes less important, and slowly varying long term states (e.g., sea surface temperatures, soil moisture, snow pack) become more important to prediction skill. Additionally, this information is needed 15 days to 45 days ahead of time, or even longer.

The Rodeo II Challenge series will create algorithms to enhance sub-seasonal forecasting, reducing risks to our water systems, and helping water managers efficiently manage hydrological regimes.

Kick Off Video

We kicked off the Rodeo 2 Challenge Series on July 19th. Join Nick, Dan, and the Reclamation Team as they provide more insight about why they are launching this series, what to expect, and more!

Hind Cast Challenge Results

The Hand Cast Challenge wrapped up on August 25th! These four marathon matches were the initial part of our Rodeo II project were participants trained weather prediction models on historical data. Thanks to all who participated, and congratulations to all of our winners!

Upcoming Challenges and Prizes

We still have $720,000 of prizes to give away, and will be doing so over the next year in our data science sprints! Beginning on September 30th we will be running a new sprint every two weeks, for a total of 26 sprints.

You need to be a Topcoder member to participate in this series.
Register For Topcoder

Sprints Schedule

Below is the full sprint schedule. To register for the current active sprint, search “Rodeo” on our Open for Registration page:

Frequently Asked Questions

Still have some questions about how to continue with these challenges? No problem, many others probably had the same question as you do.