Snoddas

A snow hydrology project to improve
predictions of hydropower dam filling rates.

Sustainability and Hydropower

Energimyndigheten = The Swedish Energy Agency launched a call HÅVA (Sustainable Hydropower) March 2018. The Swedish Meteorological Institute and Uppsala was granted their proposal SNODDAS (SNOw Distribution and Data Assimilation for improved spring flood forecast and Sustainable hydropower reservoir regulation) operational June 2018-June 2021.

This project is in cooperation with the Hydropower branch, in this project led by Björn Norell at Vattenregleringsföretagen

Overall goal of SNODDAS:

To improve the spring (melt) flood prognostics by development of better techniques to weigh the total snow water value in terrain, and assess how large uncertainy the  this factor has in the overall spring flood as compared to hydrological and meteorological prognostics.

Parted goals & methods:

a) improve the metodology for ground based observations of snow water volumes.

b) use assimilation techniques to combine gound based and remote sensed data to improve the integrated snow water volumes over our test areas.

 c) develop techniques to increase the resolution of remote sense data of snow water values delivered from passive microwave sensors such as AMSR2 (25*25 km) via down scaling/upscaling techniques using, DEMs, NVIR, NDVI and active microwave radar data.

d) hydrological modeling: compare the HBV output with the new HYPE model developed by SMHI.

 e) economical modeling: evaluation of how improved prognostics of the spring flood contribute to optimization of hydropower production and to fulfil the environmental protocols. This will be done using the legacy from the H2020 IMPREX project.

 f) dissemination with industry and academia. We have formed reference groups containing most of the hydropower companies active in Sweden, and scientific partners within all Nordic countries.