Airborne snow observations for improving inflow forecasts

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

As Europe’s leading hydropower producer, Statkraft’s natural goal is to optimally utilize water resources, which requires reliable reservoir inflow predictions. However, large uncertainties in snow amount estimates currently deteriorate inflow predictions, often resulting in poor hydropower scheduling and energy trading decisions. At present, Norwegian hydropower companies perform snow surveying campaigns in the field by sampling snow depth and density along transects using either manual probing or snow radar technologies. However, these observations only capture a small area compared to the size of a typical catchment draining to a hydropower plant (less than 1%). This under-sampling potentially often leads to large and unknown representativeness errors and assimilating this information does in many cases not increase the skill of a hydrological forecasting system. The innovation of this project is to improve this situation by taking advantage of breakthroughs in snow remote sensing and find an optimal usage of these technologies for Nordic hydropower producers. These new observations have proven to yield reliable snow state estimates for large areas in other regions, such as North America and the European Alps. In contrast to the snow surveying campaigns, the remote sensing products provide data for the complete catchment area and reduce the danger for the field staff. Thus, the major new element of this project is to test and incorporate these new remote sensing observations into the hydrological forecasting chain used by Statkraft. We anticipate that the planned innovation will improve the hydropower production planning process resulting in higher profitability of the operations, flood preventions and less spilled water.