Good Afternoon,
Apparently, the NWRFC struggled mightily with this forecast as it comes out 26 hours late and probably underwent countless revisions but still contains a lot of new energy for the Mid-C BOM and Nov. These are huge changes, let’s dive in and see if we all agree on the numbers.
Monthly Energy
Energy Scorecard
- Oct – up 2100 aMW
- Nov – up 1300 aMW
- Dec – up 600 aMW
- Jan – up 150 aMW
Those are material increases and we are surprised to see them extend across all four months. The precip event is big but not massive and not even close to records:
The above are the ten-day precip totals as of the most recent forecast (0Z) and in most cases the volume of rain has been walked down and in ALL cases is well below the ten year max for the same period. Sorry, we hate to rain on your parade, but this is not the mother of all storms and we struggle to get back to the RFC’s numbers for Oct and just toss up our hands in utter stupefaction at the Nov increases.
Just imagine what their numbers would have been had they released the forecast yesterday … you can imagine that by looking at the 10 Day:
Those kinds of numbers, those kind they published in yesterday’s 10 day, would have knocked all the gas off the margin. These latest will test that if they hold, but this storm system is slip-sliding away having dropped in each of the last three days.
Daily Energy
The current STP on Oct 19 is an outlandish 3500 aMW higher than last week, maybe it becomes reality but we think not; we think BPA cuts drafts out of BC and Lake Pend Oreille and lets everything fill up. There undoubtedly will be more energy, but doubt as much as shown in the above plot. More disconcerting is the number of days that they project increased output … like 104 straight days…. all from an inch of rain at Spokane 
NOTE: For the record, this report has changed slightly. We are now including the average of all the forecasts for the current water year (gray line).
Year on Year – Monthly
Maybe it makes more sense when we look at this forecast from a year on year perspecitive?
Nah, still looks stupid, at least Oct and Nov do to our untrained eye. Dec-Jan are just back to normal so we can attribute those changes to just returning to where the forecast should have been all along, something we were harping over in the last few STP posts.
We also have a new STP report – Day of Year
This report compares the last three years to this year by same day of year. Useful for checking out strange shapings of the energy and leading the parade of strangeness is October 2016.
This repo