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NovaStar Data / Forecasts

Introduction

Forecasts are time series that are estimated for the future. Forecasts can provide additional lead time to make decisions about events.

Forecasts in NovaStar

NovaStar's primary purpose is to store real-time data that helps to provide situational awareness for emergency management decisions. Key to such decisions is obtaining information with as much lead time as possible. Using forecast data provides additional lead time and NovaStar does support using forecast data.

Point data that are forecasts are treated similar to other point data. There are two main ways to generate forecast data for NovaStar:

  1. Run the integrated Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting Model (SAC-SMA) and write forecasts to the database.
  2. Import forecast data from external sources such as NWS, other internet sources, or other forecast models.

Whereas NovaStar typically manages event-based data reports that occur "randomly" in time, forecast data are typically represented as regular-interval time series. Consequently, the data type, interval, and time series must be properly configured. See the following:

Data web services can return forecast time series. Currently this involves checking the point name for "forecast" to determine forecast time series.

Services

The following services are related to forecasts:

  • tscatalog - returns a list of time series, including forecast time series
  • ts - returns a time series