Of course the quality of weather forecasts is impaired as they become older. The follow-up in Aiolos Forecast Studio can be used to assess how this affects the quality of load forecasts and how any real-time corrections have improved the forecasts in the short term.

By way of example, you could compare forecasts created one day in advance for elspot trading with the forecasts created the day before, i.e. two days before the forecast period. We will create a new extract selection for this purpose. Start again by clicking on  above “Extracts”.

In the dialog box displayed, we click on  at the bottom left. The following setting may be appropriate in the “Extract settings” dialog box:         

We call the new extract “2 days back” and then click on . We can see that both “elspot” and “2 days back” can be selected for inclusion in a selection.

If we select both of these, select a name (e.g. “elspot+2 days back”) for this new selection, uncheck “Unadjusted” and click on , these two forecasts are displayed together in the diagram as shown in the illustration above. You can create any number of these extracts and freely choose which of these you want to evaluate in parallel. If we had checked both “Unadjusted” and “Exported”, four curves would have been displayed in our case.

Before you decide what you want to evaluate, you should make sure that you have really created sufficiently long forecasts in connection with exporting and exported sufficiently often to have data for evaluation.  If you export every hour and are interested in the forecast quality 1, 2 and 3 hours ahead in time, you can create an extract for 1 hour ahead with the following setting

“Length of extract” is set here to “1 hour”, which means that the program evaluates one hour at a time. For every hour, Aiolos will search for an export created in the first quarter of the preceding hour and evaluate only the current hour from this forecast. Then the program steps forward one hour and repeats the procedure until the entire period has been evaluated.