Document Type
Article
Language
eng
Publication Date
2021
Publisher
MDPI
Source Publication
Energies
Source ISSN
1996-1073
Abstract
Natural gas customers rely upon utilities to provide gas for heating in the coldest parts of winter. Heating capacity is expensive, so utilities and end users (represented by commissions) must agree on the coldest day on which a utility is expected to meet demand. The return period of such a day is long relative to the amount of weather data that are typically available. This paper develops a weather resampling method called the Surrogate Weather Resampler, which creates a large dataset to support analysis of extremely infrequent events. While most current methods for generating weather data are based on simulation, this method resamples the deviations from typical weather. The paper also shows how extreme temperatures are strongly correlated to the demand for natural gas. The Surrogate Weather Resampler was compared in-sample and out-of-sample to the WeaGETS weather generator using both the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test and an exceedance-based test for cold weather generation. A naïve benchmark was also examined. These methods studied weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and AccuWeather. Weather data were collected for 33 weather stations across North America, with 69 years of data from each weather station. We show that the Surrogate Weather Resampler can reproduce the cold tail of distribution better than the naïve benchmark and WeaGETS.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Kaftan, David J.; Corliss, George; Povinelli, Richard J.; and Brown, Ronald H., "A Surrogate Weather Generator for Estimating Natural Gas Design Day Conditions" (2021). Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications. 671.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/electric_fac/671
ADA Accessible Version
Comments
Published version. Energies, Vol. 14, No. 21 (2021): 7118. DOI. © 2021 by the authors. Used with permission.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).