Coast Mountain Hydro
Hydroelectric Operations and Reservoir Sedimentation
Coast Mountain Hydro
Hydroelectric Operations and Reservoir Sedimentation
Coast Mountain Hydro runs three hydroelectric facilities in northwestern British Columbia: Forrest Kerr (195 MW), McLymont (66 MW), and Volcano (16 MW). To support the operation of the project, NHC developed a semi-distributed physically based hydrological model for flow forecasting.
The original version of the model was developed in Hec-HMS. In 2022, the model was upgraded to a modified HBV-EC model with the Raven modelling framework and a more stable forecasting platform. NHC developed a custom forecasting system which links Environment Canada forecasts, the real-time database management system for all hydrometric and meteorological stations at the project, and the hydrological models to produce 10-day streamflow forecasts which are delivered twice a day via email to project staff.
NHC developed and calibrated the hydrologic models, implemented the forecasting system, and continue to oversee model performance. The Raven model used a mixed manual and automatic calibration procedure and was calibrated to optimize both peak flow and low flow performance using the pareto-archived dynamically dimension search.
NHC also installs and manages the hydrometric and meteorological stations at site which ultimately feed into the hydrological model as forcing data. This includes data review and the use of strict quality assurance/quality control procedures of the data.