Hydropower Resource Assessment at Existing Reclamation Facilities

Chapter 2Hydropower Site Data Collectionelevation was identified based on elevation of outlet works in thedesign drawings. Reclamation Area Offices’ or Irrigation Districts’ records –Reclamation’s area offices or irrigation districts operating the sitemaintain flow data for some sites. Daily data was provided in Excelfiles or in written records. Reclamation Area Offices’ and Irrigation Districts’ staff knowledge -Area office and irrigation district staff had local knowledge of somesites through operation, maintenance, or inspection and could providegeneral knowledge on flow and head data. This local information wasapplied, as necessary and applicable, to some sites and assigned a “lowconfidence” in the analysis (see below). Most often, staff knowledgewas applied if the site did not have hydropower potential, as staffgenerally knew about flow magnitude and frequency and if head wasavailable for hydropower production.2.5 Data Collection and Confidence LevelsThe Resource Assessment is very data-intensive. Reclamation made significantefforts to research and find hydrologic data for all 530 sites. ReclamationTechnical Service Center staff coordinated closely with area offices in eachregion to collect data. Reclamation’s field offices and local irrigation districtswere also consulted for hydrologic data.Best efforts were made to collect complete data for all 530 sites; however, somesites had missing or incomplete data. In most instances, incomplete data wasmanipulated in order to be adequate for the planning level of analysis in theResource Assessment. As a result of the variability in data, Reclamation hasassigned confidence ratings to data collected for each site based on the source,availability and consistency of data. Data was classified as high, medium, orlow confidence, defined below. Table 2-1 shows the number of high, mediumand low confidence data by region.High Confidence: assigned to data downloaded from Hydromet,USGS gages, or data collected from the previously conducted 1834Study. Data has continuous daily data sets for a minimum of threeyears.Medium Confidence: assigned to data downloaded from Hydromet orUSGS that had data gaps. Some of the data downloaded from theHydromet or USGS sites had missing data points, either single datapoints or weeks to months of missing data. This data was still valuableand adequate to use for the planning level analysis in the ResourceAssessment; therefore, data gaps were filled in using best professional2-16 – March 2011