Graduate student Mike Wallace is refining a way to forecast stream flow levels with tremendous accuracy, according to a UNM release.
Under UNM professor emeritus Harjit Ahluwalia, Wallace is working on a Ph.D. in nanoscience and microsystems. A hydrologist by trade, Wallace said in the release that he began focusing his research on stream flows in New Mexico about three years ago, stumbling upon an interesting connection between stream flow levels in the Rio Grande and a recurring temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean, called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
“The flow record of the Rio Grande at the Otowi Gauge has always been of primary interest to many members of the regional wide water resources community. This gauge is near Otowi Bridge between Los Alamos and Santa Fe and has measured stream flow for over 100 years,” Wallace said in the release. “An equivalent 100-plus-year record for the PDO has also been independently developed. From my growing familiarity with the stochastic patterns of both, I could see, as a few before me had also recognized, that these two natural historical records looked remarkably similar to each other.”
According to the release, Wallace studied the numbers more carefully and found that when measured according to the climatological 10-year average, a form of the Correlation Coefficient between a lagged PDO - Otowi connection was very high -- about 80 percent. In May 2014, Wallace published his first quantitative hydro-climatologic forecast on his website, using the PDO. He predicted what the 10-year trailing average flow rate would be for the Otowi Gauge by the end of the year.
His projection was later shown to be 98 percent accurate. Wallace said in the release that this performance was a significant improvement over the current prediction methods that focus on snowpack levels in local mountains.
Wallace decided to turn his research into a small business, all while continuing to get his Ph.D. Now, he serves a variety of customers, including local government subscribers to his quarterly forecast service. He forecasts stream flows and temperatures in several states including Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, California and Oregon, according to the release.
“When planning a major infrastructure project, for example, it’s beneficial to the manager of the asset to have a better sense of where the hydro-climate trends are,” Wallace said in the release. “Are we trending to a warmer winter this year, or a colder winter? A wetter spring, or a drier summer? These are some of the questions that my method can help, over the long term, to shave away a little more of the natural uncertainty from.”
Wallace worked with a Los Alamos National Laboratory atmospheric scientist, Dr. Petr Chylek, through the New Mexico Small Business Assistance Program on a complementary method to provide five-year trailing average forecasts.
Wallace also described his ongoing preliminary UNM research, which appears to document that the sun's flare-ups highly correlate, through a "Hadley Annular Parameter (HAP)", years in advance to some hydro-climatology indexes of the US Southwest. This is in addition to the PDO connection, said Wallace in the release.
"Conceivably, many societies of the near future will be able to anticipate both natural temperature and moisture (multi-year averaged) in their regions, four years or longer ahead, with relatively high accuracy,” Wallace said in the release. “This seems likely, even if many of the ocean and related connections turn out to be merely commensal, because of the strong lagged correlations already evident."
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