During Rosendalsveko, PhD candidate Kamilla Wergeland presented how Småkraft and Climate Futures are developing new methods to estimate river flow, especially in areas with little or no measurement data.
Small hydropower plants are vulnerable to changes, which is why it’s important to understand how future climate conditions will affect water resources. The project therefore works with both short-term forecasts (a few days ahead) and long-term climate perspectives.
– The advantage of using a machine learning model is that it has been exposed to a large number of hydrological conditions and various climate types. For example, if the climate in a watershed changes to become either wetter or drier, the model has likely seen this before and can adapt, Wergeland explains.
You can watch Wergeland’s full presentation at 15:43 in this video (in Norwegian): https://www.youtube.com/live/TvB7bOaxWeo
