Services / Water Resources Planning and Management
Forecasting
Careful operation of energy and water systems can mean considerable monetary savings and improved customer confidence.
With the expanding complexity of today's water supply systems come reliability and cost challenges. Water supply managers can improve reliability and decrease costs by using quantitative probabilistic forecasts of useful hydrologic and system variables. Hydrosphere has experience with the most modern forecasting techniques, allowing us to make forecasts of variables with direct relevance to the water supply manager.
Both municipal and agricultural water supply systems can benefit from the use of forecasts. Forecasts of water demand can be useful over time frames of hours to days or longer, while forecasts of hydrologic conditions can be useful over time frames of days to years. Municipal water system managers can use a combination of demand and supply forecasts to assist in decisions about when to impose demand management programs or when to acquire or release supplemental supplies.
The demand for energy and power has a significant correlation to weather, particularly in regions with heavy cooling loads. The availability of energy and power from hydroelectric facilities is directly related to hydrologic conditions. With the increased reliance on spot markets for energy and power, considerable monetary benefits can be achieved by the use of forecasts of supply and demand conditions. These forecasts can be made on operational time frames (hours to days) and planning time frames (months to years).
The current state of our knowledge of the linkages between climate and hydrology has made it possible to generate increasingly more useful and skillful forecasts. It is no longer necessary to puzzle over the significance of traditional "wetter than usual" or "drier than usual" forecasts-Hydrosphere can provide quantitative forecasts in terms of: system yields, reservoir contents, streamflows, water use, temperatures or other variables, and we can condition those forecasts with current climate state variables such as el Nino.
- Hydrosphere's forecasting services and capabilities include:
- Statistical analysis
- Temporal and spatial downscaling
- Downscaling of GCM output
- Resampling techniques
- Climate state conditioning
- Monte Carlo techniques
- Climate variable forecasts
- System variable forecasts