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<br />" , -. t I' (J <br />l}uv 2 ~ ' <br /> <br />for dam safety purposes and are being automated to <br />use with this system, partially because of its alarm <br />capahility. <br /> <br />All this information goes into a common datahase. <br />The districts have information they need to operate <br />their tributary reservoirs and review daily, and so does <br />the main Reservoir Control Center. Our modeling, <br />then, is run on the North Pacific Division computer. <br /> <br />One of the problems we have is that a simulation <br />model is just a series of mathematic equations, which <br />moves water downstream at the right time just as it <br />would if it occurred naturally. One of the components <br />of that is we know what is in the river and moving it <br />down is no problem, it's the rainfall runoff part. That's <br />the big problem. We don't have a lot of sites in the <br />basin and that part is hard to figure out, let alone <br />forecast. Primarily because the thunderstorms in this <br />area of the basin are of the convective nature. That <br />means there are spotty rainfalls that result, clouds just <br />build up and you get a large rainfall and you can't <br />really monitor it very well with sites as far apart as <br />these sites are bere. <br /> <br />We think there is an opportunity in the future t.o <br />become more involved with what you've probably seen <br />on your local television weather stations which show <br />radar maps. If you use this information, plus use the <br />data collection platform to check on it to make sure <br />it is giving you the right information, there's potential <br />to use this in runoff models to get a better distribution <br />on how that rainfall is occurring. <br /> <br />You can see right here that the rainfall is real spotty. <br />If you don't have a gauge under one of the places where <br />it was raining just a few miles a way, you wouldn't <br />have rainfall. So modeling rainfall is very difficult for <br />us to do even though we can look out our window and <br />see it's raining, we can't look over the whole basin and <br />we have no idea of what's really going on. <br /> <br />This is one storm event, the one I just showed you, <br />but the peaks on there are up to ten inches of rainfall. <br />The lower ones are zero. You can see how the precip <br />varies. Hopefully, by using this we will be able to get <br />a better feel for what rainfall occurred underneath <br />those, along with the real time collection from the data <br />collection platform. That's our hope anyway, and <br />that's being worked on experimentally, but that's not <br />being used in the field yet. <br /> <br />All the data we collect is monitored with microcom- <br />puters, by staff, and verified. We do not issue any <br />actual change of gates. We issue what is called a reg- <br />ulation order, then the gates are changed by project <br />personnel. They have a rather elaborate system going <br />in called the REHAC (Regional Hydropower Action <br />Center), where it's a computerized system both to <br />monitor various functions inside the power plant, tur- <br />bines, generators, and also control the gates auto- <br />matically. This is a picture of that board. At Gavins <br />Point they will be able to control all the reservoirs <br />from that one location. <br /> <br />39 <br />