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Inflow Forecast for Hetch Hetchy Water and Power
The Public Utilities Commission Hetch Hetchy Water and Power brings drinking water from the Sierra Mountains to San Francisco through a system of reservoirs and pipelines. The PUC ensures water quality through its monitoring programs, and seeks to protect the environment from harmful discharges into the water supply. In this context, Vista software is an important tool for the energy and water release scheduler.
To improve operations, inflow forecasting functionality is being added to the existing implementation comprising LT Vista and ST Vista. This will provide both deterministic short-term forecasts (hourly for ten days), as well as long-term “extended stream flow forecasts” to be used by the scheduling modules.
The mountainous characteristics of Yosemite Park bring a special challenge to the inflow forecaster. The very steep mountains, high precipitation and high temperature variation over the watershed constitute an interesting problem to the hydrologist. The area is generally well equipped in terms of automated weather stations and measured river flows. Synexus has successfully calibrated the two main watersheds by splitting the watershed into elevation bands. Each elevation band has been considered as a separate watershed and calibrated successfully.
Now the focus is on setting-up the weather data acquisition to allow the Inflow Forecast to work in real time. After the latter is completed, Hetch Hetchy will be well equipped to plan and maximize the use of their precious water.