Twitter Flow Reports

For years I've been trying to come up with a simple way to check the flow from lower camp. Cell signal sucks down there and it's rare that you get a good enough digital signal to pull up the entire website. Well thanks to the twitter service and too much coffee I've created a twitter account that will send you updated flow data via text messages.

If your not using twitter yet here are some simple instructions:

1. got www.twitter.com and create an account
2. make sure to add your cell phone as a device once you are set up
3. Goto http://twitter.com/KernFlow and "follow" Kern flow
4. you have a choice here, if you want to get messages every 6 hours with the flow data simply turn device updates on for KernFlow.......OR..... you can send a text message "get kernflow" to 40404 and twitter will send you the latest upper and lower flow numbers.

Let me know if you have any problems getting it to work or any general twitter questions. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/theryanguy

More Flows

Due to popularity of this idea I've started expanding my collection of the Twitter Flow Reports.  I'll keep adding them here as I set them up:

KernFlow

http://www.twitter.com/kernflow/

RogueFlow

http://twitter.com/rogueflow/

MFFlow

http://twitter.com/MFFLOW/

  Kern Flow Estimater

So for a few years the geeky side of me has been contemplating creating a flow prediction program for the upcoming season.  I spend enough time looking at the snow pack totals, and there is that giant CDEC database...

So long story short I was really board at a coffee shop the other day and a threw this thing together.

The attached excel work book has 3 spreadsheets in it.  The main sheet "Charts" graphs and summarizes the data inside the two other sheets "Snow" and "Flow" respectively.

If you look at the chart you can see the average snow fall and average seasonal flows(the entire season April-Sept averaged together) for the last few years.  At the end of the chart I've used historical data based on the relationship between seasonal snowfall averages and season flow averages to predict what kind of season we are going to have.  I factor in the snow we have received so far and then add in 40 year snow fall averages of March and April to take a guess at what kind of season to expect.

A note on the data set:  since I thew this together on short notice I cheated a little and based my snow fall data set off of the historical snowfall in Mammoth.  Both the Kern Snow pack and Mammoth tend to get hit by the same storms so the prediction still works well enough.  In future versions i will try and compile the Kern Snow pack data, if I can find a snow pack sensor that works as consistently as those loads do up at mammoth mountain ski resort.

UPDATE: I've added in a season peak prediction.  Now you can go into your Darby beer bets with confidence

Information as of 2/21/2009  [Download Spreadsheet]