February 28, 2020

Combining a Weather Forecast with a Stochastic Weather Generator

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

A couple of years ago, I blogged about the application of the GoldSim WGEN model for producing probabilistic time histories of precipitation and temperature data. WGEN is useful for modeling natural systems impacted by uncertain climate influences. This model can also be used for simulating future scenarios and forecasting.

Even though the results of a WGEN model are probabilistic and uncertain, they are based on historical observed records and tied to the latitude of the earth. This allows us to produce realistic future simulations. But if you plan to use WGEN for short-term forecasting (less than 6 months), it might be helpful to incorporate a weather forecast for the first part of the simulation. Read more to see how a web service forecast model is combined with WGEN to produce a more reasonable forecast for a specific location without having to manually download the forecast.