Manager, Weather and Streamflow Forecasting at U.S. Department of Energy

>> I'm Eric Pilack [assume spelling] I manage the weather and streamflow forecasting group at the Bonneville Power Administration, which is out in Portland Oregon and we do the weather and streamflow forecasting for the federal dams in the Pacific Northwest for electricity generation. Basically, the weather and stream filled forecasts are going into decisions for how much electricity we need to generate on any given day, week, month and then also how much water we have available to generate that electricity and to run it through our dams in an optimal way. We also are managing constraints on the system like maintaining irrigation, maintaining navigation, helping maintain flows for fish migration so it's a pretty complicated and fun job. We're using a lot of weather models, weather and streamflow modeling systems. The weather models we get from NOAA the National Weather Service and then we do value added products for that and then we have our own hydrologic model on site, it's actually a hydrologic model that's used pretty widely in federal agencies across the United States and we use that to forecast the water going through the system. A busy day starts early, it's about 6:30, 7AM and we're right away starting to do the weather forecast for 8am briefings and then those briefings help plan those decisions for the next few hours to days to weeks. While all of that's going on and we go back and start issuing our streamflow forecasts and then that's the second round of information we provide and then we're doing briefings throughout the day, we're doing a lot of support 1:1, 1 on few with different groups within the power of administration. We're even doing some severe weather support in terms of transmission, making sure that we're not getting ice or snow on the lines and that helps us to manage the system better.