How The Weather Affects Power Traders - MetDesk

I'm your host, Ed Porter. Welcome back to transmission. There's an El Nino building in the Pacific that some models say could be the biggest in a century. That's warm water off the coast of South America. So why does it matter to a power trader in Europe? Because weather is the input the entire energy system runs on, and this episode follows the chain from sea surface temperatures all the way to power prices. Dunkelflauters, French nuclear shutting down when the rivers run too hot, AI models versus human forecasters. My guests are Emma Patmore and Matt Dobson, meteorologists from MetDesk, the people who turn the weather forecast into something an energy trading desk can actually act on. Want to know what the next Dunkelfonte could do to German power prices? Ask Coe, Motor Energy's AI analyst. Link below. And if you're not already, make sure to give us a rating and follow wherever you listen. Let's jump in. Hello, both. Welcome to transmission. Thank you for having us. Yeah. It's great to be here, Ed. Our pleasure to have you on. I've been wanting to do a weather episode for ages and now is finally the chance. So Matt, I'm gonna come to you first. What does everyone get wrong about weather forecasting? Okay. So weather forecasting is a complex science. There's lots of variables at play. The atmosphere is a chaotic system. But I think it's only in terms of the energy industry. One of the things I feel is that they assume that forecast skill or predictability is is static. So a day ahead forecast will always have a certain element of skill, trying to predict say a month, three months ahead will have a certain level of skill. So it's that kind of myth that we're trying to break down when we're consulting with clients that the variability in skill is quite large. Sometimes predicting a day ahead is is easy. Other times, it can be very, very challenging. And likewise, a seasonal forecast, sometimes there are windows of opportunity and that's what we try and get into energy traders, energy analysts heads that there can be these opportunities to predict maybe four months ahead quite skillfully, but not all the time. Okay. And we yeah. Well, that's so a really obvious question is, when you're talking about skill, do you mean the like, success of the thing that you're doing? So let's say the day before you say the wind speed's gonna be fifteen meters per second, and then we get into that day, like, what is a good skill? What what is a good outcome? Is it sort of the accuracy in sort of ten percent away from that or or like do do you feel like you could predict it down to something more narrow? That's right. I mean, obviously, wind is a little bit more challenging in temperature to to predict. So for example, a day ahead wind forecast, let's say eighty percent of the time, the arbitrary figure, you should be within maybe ten fifteen percent quite commonly. But now and again, you get weather patterns that can introduce some uncertainty and chaos into the pattern. For example, an area of low pressure, that's bad weather, that's cloud, that's wind, that's rain. If that tracks in a slightly different position, you can end up having maybe thirty percent or forty percent less or more wind than if it tracks maybe slightly. We're talking like miles here. Fifty mile north, the low pressure could bring a lot more wind. Fifty miles south, it could bring a lot less wind. So these are the events we watch for to give clients an area of idea of risk. And likewise, temperature, you know, trying to forecast that maybe a month ahead. Now and again, there are these windows of of opportunity, but wind is harder to predict in temperature. So your your list of, like, what's easy to predict, what's hard to predict, temperature is sort of easy relatively easy and then kind of, like, you're moving towards wind is slightly harder. Where do things like solar fit into that? Yeah. I think relatively is a good word. I mean, there's always opportunities to get, you know, for the weather to be wrong or or rather our forecast to be wrong and the weather to do something different. But temperatures are more sort of evenly spread parameter, if you like, compared to wind. Okay. And wind can be affected by lots of different things like topography and, for example, individual weather systems. Okay. Solar, that can be easy sometimes, but it is affected by things like snowfall. You're thinking about solar generation. You're thinking about solar panels. How can the solar panels be messed around with by other things? So for example, dust from the Sahara, believe it or not, can get blown up towards Europe. We had that a few years ago. I remember seeing it sort of on the cars, this kind of like this clay like dust that was on everything. That's right. So you go and get your car washed on a Friday, you get a Sahara and dust event on a Friday night and you're very sad on a Saturday morning. Do you do you have a forecast of Sahara and dust? We do on our MetDesk have now taken the CAMS, the Copernicus aerosol monitoring. And we have a five day charts looking at the dust. So dust is one thing, snowfall. You can get a lot of snow on the panels that sometimes doesn't melt back and have an effect. So you've got all these other factors that are not Yeah. Cloud related as well. Can I ask, the Copernicus aerosol monitoring, I hope I got that right? Yeah. Is that that is a satellite looking down or is or is that a difference the stratosphere? That's a weather model Okay. That specializes in fine particles of dust in the atmosphere. So you're you're looking at something very specialized. And obviously, it's a three-dimensional thing, a plume of dust. It's not just a thin layer, it's like all different levels of the atmosphere. This is this this is crazy. I've got real concerns this episode might go to like two and a half hours as I ask loads of really stupid questions about things that I think people in the weather the the weather space know really well. I was gonna ask one more question before I come to Emma on the the Dunkelflaucher in in a second. But you mentioned that sort of like across like a fifty kilometer space, you could get really different results. Is is is that sort of is that the level of detail you can go into? So, you know, you could be sort of fifty kilometers away from someone and you could be seeing a totally different day's worth of weather? To be honest, it can be even less than that. I mean, for think for example, you're you're out on a bike ride or a walk and there's a thunderstorm approaching. Some places are gonna absolutely hammered with heavy rain and lightning and hail, and then literally a couple of miles away or or even less, you may miss it. So the weather operates on so many different scales. Frost, sometimes you can get frost in a valley, you don't get frost a couple of miles away on a hill. So there are those kind of very narrow scales that make even intraday forecasting challenging. But on the bigger scale, a lot of the time, the weather doesn't change that much over fifty, one hundred, one hundred miles. I'm gonna look out the window and say, well, today, especially in the southeast of England, many of us are getting a very similar weather on on scales We were we were like, we're doing a podcast about whether we had to look out the window at some point. I'm glad you did it first. So, okay. And and and and the the thing that people get wrong, right, you the that you've that you've talked about is is that skill element. So sometimes you can look say to the weather tomorrow and you can have a really high degree of certainty on it, but sometimes you could say, actually, I really don't have that confidence. I think that's right. Yeah. I think that's where the the expertise comes in. That's why energy clients speak to to people like ourselves because we're we're monitoring that kind of threat of the skill changing. Okay. Okay. Really interesting. Emma, I'm gonna come to you with a with a slightly more energy specific question. So the thing that the Northern Hemisphere energy systems worry about is this thing people call a Dunkelflaute, which is a German word that we borrowed and essentially means that it's cold period, so demand is high, wind is low, and there's obviously, it's winter, so there's not much sun. It's quite hard for a renewable system to deal with that. So I just wanted to understand from you, like what what's the driving force behind that? What's actually happening from a weather sense to give us those conditions? Yeah. I mean, within a system, it can quite often be high pressure pulling in and so you end up with those lower wind periods with that cooler air pulling in from the north, so from Scandinavia for example, and so you end up with that combination and they can really vary as to how long they last for. So I pulled the data just yesterday. We had a big spreadsheet put together looking at German wind particularly there, and we were having a look. We took factor of it, so we're looking at sort of megawatts per gigawatt so that that didn't impact the numbers. And over the last five years, you know, most of the events, they were only lasting like two, three days. So they're not sort of longer lasting things. You get your low pressure coming in and freshening things up, for example, shifting out that fog. But there are examples where you do have that longer. So in twenty twenty four November particularly, we ended up with a period of nine days where that just sort of sat over statically and so That was twenty twenty four, we had nine days? Yes. Okay. Because I yeah. I think like a rule of thumb I had in my head was sort of a fourteen day period every five years. But and then that seems like we're we're in a similar ballpark to each other there. So but you said nine days, was that for Germany or was that for the UK? That's Germany. Okay. So Germany is quite often where people tend to be interested in. So I focus the research towards that. It's a big market. They have most of their capacity in terms of wind and solar. They've got quite a lot. They've got about a hundred gig now. Okay. So it's quite a powerful source of their sort of grid. And that is sort of statistically what's happening. You mentioned from a weather perspective, and you have to forgive me because I'm not, yeah, a huge weather expert. I'm gonna have to sort of ask you around this. But you said you had high pressure coming in and what what does that do? Does it kind of does that create almost like a dome that keeps out change in the weather system? Is is it like how does that sort of prevent the wind from coming through? Right? So Does make sense to the question? Yeah. So when you have this high pressure systems pulling in and sitting over the entire sort of northern side of Europe, if it's quite strong, it can be quite static. So any low pressures could sort of slip underneath it, slide over the top, and so you're not gonna get that sort of pressure gradient. So for that wind to come in, you want a low pressure system to be pushing against that high, and so you've got the gradient there to bring it and that's where you get your breezier scenarios. So when you're under this sort of high pressure system just sat overhead, you got a really slack flow and so you're just not seeing that wind and if you've not got the wind, you've got your sort of cooler conditions overnight, you start seeing that fog settling in in the mornings, you've got the wind to clear it out and so you end up seeing it sat for longer. Okay. You're gonna have to unpack this for me because I was looking at it like a weather map, almost like in a two d sense. But immediately I see that's wrong and that it's kind of a three d piece and you've got sort of pockets of pressure and high wind going in the middle and low going over or above. And like how how does so just just to make sure I really understand that. So so like to get a Dunkelfauter, what actually what is actually happening? Is it so I I think I followed you up until this high this high weather this high pressure block effectively comes in and sits above a country. And then that is so strong, to sort of borrow a phrase, that that it's kind of keeping out other weather systems or other sort of pressure systems for coming in. Is that is that is that right? Yeah. So imagine you had a map of Europe on your table and say you have your high pressure site over, say, Scandinavia, for example, is pulled around gear. And so any low pressure system which is coming up against it, it could imagine it was completely flat, you could see it dropping down into Spain, going around it, for example, or it could slip over pushed around the other way? Is that Yeah. So you need that sort of Scandi either to pull northwards to start allowing some slow pressure to come underneath it for example. I suppose underneath is on a flat sense, so I mean, sort of coming up more so towards like Switzerland for example. I'm with you. Okay. To move northwards rather than And and why does it move? Like like couldn't it couldn't high pressure couldn't a high pressure blob, that's not a technical term, couldn't it just stay there forever? I mean, you have different teleconnections at play. So different things which are happening elsewhere which drive the pattern. So for example, one that's cropping up lots in the news at the moment is the El Nino Southern Oscillation, which is a pattern in terms of sea surface temperatures that can drive a weather pattern. There's something called the Madden Julian Oscillation, which is about precip and rainfall over and towards different regions of the world, and that again moves over, can start encouraging more low pressure to push through. So there's many different drivers which could be happening in a complete other side of the globe Yeah. And influencing sort of what we're seeing. And so that's one of the things we look at a lot is what's going on elsewhere. Could that be driving things? Could that help change our regimes? Okay. So we so we shouldn't think about Europe in like a narrow it's just European weather. We should be thinking about some of those global phenomenons as well. Yeah. I mean, a good example is a typhoon or a hurricane. It's like a pulse of of energy in the atmosphere if you like and that can shake up the whole weather pattern. So you said, could it last forever, the high pressure? Well, up until a point where there's a nudge a different part of the climate system. That could come from the tropics, that could come from America, and that will shake up the the pattern again. So there's normally a finite time. I mean, sometimes three weeks. We get heat wave that lasts for three weeks. Dunker Flatten maybe lasts two weeks, but there's normally something that then changes everything. So something else changes somewhere else in the world Yes. Gives it a nudge and it's not like it's a stable equilibrium, so it kinda keeps on coming back to the same place, it will just move on to another part of the globe. Yeah. And you mentioned El Nino, so so maybe maybe let's do it. Let's let's let's jump to an El Nino. I I have been reading the news. Some some very good news outlets cover it seriously. Some cover it not so seriously. I mean, how how much actual science is behind the like the sort of long range El Nino forecast? Should I take this one? You can go. So I'm I'm quite excited about this one because it could be the biggest El Nino we've had in maybe a century. I mean, the the reliable data goes back to nineteen fifty. How are we able to make that statement already? Well, El Nino starts under the water in in the tropical Pacific. So imagine you're in South America, you go to the west of South America, you got the the big Pacific there. It's the tropics. And El Nino is when it becomes very very warm between Australia and and South America, effectively, the sea surface warms up. There's a lot of energy loading up at the moment to make this maybe the biggest one we've seen since twenty fifteen. That was the last really big one. So Okay. First big Alnino in over ten years. But potentially, some models are saying this could be even stronger than that one. Okay. And that means lots of energy in the water. Yep. Lots of warm water. What does that mean for Europe? So it flips the global circulation pattern. Normally, the water of South America is relatively cold. The reason it's called El Nino is that Spanish for the boy child and it it's basically a Christmas phenomenon. It comes in November December time and it means that all the fishermen that used to try and catch fish off South America suddenly had no fish. Fish like cold water. Okay. They don't like warm water, so they all disappeared. So it's a historical thing that was noticed but it has a massive effect on the climate system. So for example, it has a big effect on America and that then has a diluted effect on Europe. So I would say El Nino has some effects, particularly when it's very strong, but it's not the only thing affects European weather. So we're kind of looking at it and not in isolation, but we're looking at it along with other And and what would we expect to see just from like we're going from solar, wind, snowfall, rain, like what how does El Nino change what we see? To keep it simple, Emma might have other opinions, but to keep it simple for me is the autumn is when it has the biggest effect on Europe, the most reliable effect. Okay. And it tends to mean we have a warmer than normal autumn. In terms of wind, you can get a heightened chance of winter in the UK as you get through November and December. But sometimes, it can bring quite a calm period in in say, mid autumn and Scandinavia can go quite chilly. So the later you get into autumn, the earlier you get into winter, the more chance of wind events, mild conditions where maybe demand is lower Okay. For heating, but you're getting some supply. But across the Alps, it can be a nightmare for the ski season. So there's people going skiing for Christmas. Okay. So They suffer. So if you're taking notes, then skiing for yeah. The the winter of twenty twenty six could be a bit dodgy. Certainly before Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Get a get a higher altitude chalet if you're booking. Okay. But this this is kind of this goes back to your first statement. Right? Which is that you've described El Nino in some fantastic detail with the historical references. But if I'm maybe Emma, come to you with with this. Like if I'm on a trading desk and I'm trying to work out like what do I do from a power trading perspective with the knowledge of of this El Nino coming. You mentioned that perhaps it could be slightly warmer, perhaps it could be wind hitting Scandinavia as well. It might come to sort of Southern Europe, it might come to to to Scandi. How do I well, like, what what do I do with that information? Like, is there a is there a trade I could do? Like, how how do I how do I get better at my job from doing that? Well, we talk to a lot of people, obviously. And one of the things I really like to do is try and find out what information people want and just have normal conversations with them. So, different clients will use it in a completely different way. One thing that we do a lot in our forecast is looking at sort of a most likely scenario, so that's sort of what Matt's discussed there in the El Nino sense, what is the most likely scenario you'll see. But there is also the alternative which may be driven to something else, and so we have to communicate that risk and they'll sort of price in and say, okay, well, this is our most likely scenario. This is probably what the market's seeing, but what if that's wrong? Where can we sort of make something from that? And so they'll look at sort of what we're saying, how do we think the models could move? Okay. Well, we'll price in based on what the model's showing now. How do you think things could change over the next sort of couple of months? And so can we get ahead of that model move, react now, and obviously then make the money when people panic a later So they're trading say gas and power. Yeah. And Matt's just said, right. Biggest one since twenty fifteen. Biggest El Nino since twenty fifteen. And let's assume they're not exposed to fish fisherman's cash in in the Pacific. Right? But they they would think, oh, well, do I need to buy as much gas this year as I would have done in previous years because the temperature is likely to be slightly higher because the El Nino comes through in early winter. So they should be less concerned about gas reserves. Is that the kind of Is the kind of that logic but then you have to think beyond that as well. And so it's thinking, in that time, yes, that's what the temperature is, that's what your demand is. Okay. You might have some more low pressure in the northwest, so that pressure gradient will be there, so you have a bit more wind. However, if you then say, okay, the Alps are seeing less snow than usual in the snow season. Okay. When you get to melt season, that's not getting in your reservoirs, so your hydro generation might be less. So think about the slowing your river levels coming down, and so maybe next summer, you end up in more of a situation where your rivers river levels are a bit lower. And so then could you be looking more at river temps? So it's not just the in the now, it's right then, that's what it's impacting. You have to think, okay, where could that then leave you going forward as So they're going they're going short q four gas Yeah. And then they're going long And you can start pissing twenty seven. That's what Matt was saying earlier. Low energy barrier. Talking with Emma's already mentioned high pressure, and high pressure is basically where the air is sinking. Okay. And you can with a big mild high pressure set across the Alps through quite a lot of the q four, particularly November and December, which is is dry and mild, which is something we we shouldn't really see, you know. High pressure should bring chilly weather, but we're getting warmer and warmer air masses coming in in the autumns these days, you know. We're getting these sort of calm, mild patterns, which can sometimes lead to Dunkle Flauter. But yeah, I'd be thinking temperature is probably the biggest, I was forecasting and trying to help a trader. Temperature is where I'd be trying to guide them Okay. For mild autumn. But watch out for wind because we're not sure where that boundary is gonna sit between the low wind and the high wind. That's too early to say. Okay. And this is this is kind of this leads me into sort of a a question I really wanted to ask, which is that you're meteorologists. Right? So this is what you do day in day out. I also know that companies have access to ECMWF data and I'm gonna ask you what that means in a second. But that feels like couldn't couldn't, you know, in this in this day of sort of AI, couldn't they just sort of like run that data through that and do do they actually need someone who can give them context on top? Like, how do you fit into this to this world? Yeah. I guess technically, yes, you could just download it. It's the European Centre for Medium Weather Forecasting. Okay. But there is just so much available. I mean, that's not the only model. You've also got the Global Forecasting Centre, GFS, UK Met Office have a model. Even if you just took the EC data as a baseline, you've got a hundred and fifty one members if you look at the different models they have. They've got medium range, they've got a longer range, you then got a season. There's just so much data Yeah. Available and making sense of that every single member isn't gonna show the same thing. You've got the uncertainty in there and so, when you talk to a forecaster, we can say, okay, this is what the pattern's showing. We can link it back to how we think the model could evolve. We could say, okay, we think that low pressure is gonna tighten up and say, the plume has below normal wind at the moment on average. But actually, you're probably gonna get a brief peak as that system moves through which there's uncertainty on the timing so the ensemble mean just isn't getting at. Okay. So it's that sort of detail that you can then start to add in there. And you mentioned an ensemble. What what's an ensemble? It's so the run is sort of set off at time zero and you get the spread. So that's what the ensemble is. So it has, say, on the medium range model has fifty members. Each one will likely show a different sort of route basically of how you can move and so it's forced in the computation. Okay. When you say it's got fifty members, what what do you mean? Fifty runs. It's it all starts at the same time but you sort of run it fifty times, you end up with fifty lines of temperature, fifty lines of Okay. So like an ensemble is like bringing together those those runs into like into one package that a that a trading house could say look at. And and why are there, like, why are there multiple versions of this? Because it it feels like you said there were three groups that are that could provide you with these ensembles. Like, a, why why are there so many of them? But but also b, like, they match up? Do they all kinda say the same thing? Very rarely. Very rarely. Okay. Well, maybe that's a good reason to have three. When you see consensus, you can start being a bit happier, I guess, with the general story. But it's that idea of communicating chaos of the atmosphere. I mean, the weather itself can change quickly, everyone knows. I mean, if you look on your weather app, it quite often flips and everyone gets annoyed. Mean, it's trying to communicate that. So you're looking at all this data that's available and trying to make sense of a chaotic pattern. So you need all that spread. You need to look at those different centers. Some do better at certain things. So for example, if you took an AI versus a sort of traditional model, sometimes the traditional can do a bit better on very small features just because the grid spacing is tighter and the resolution is higher. But if you want a higher level story at, say, the ten to fifteen day range, quite often, it's the AI that it's quite often, in our experience, a little bit ahead. Yeah. I think it's worth clarifying here, Ed, about the AI models because metrology has had a huge, you know, change in the last just few years with AI modeling alongside the, you know, the numerical modeling. So numerical modeling is solving equations of the atmosphere, lots of equations which are producing a forecast. Whereas AI is looking at what's happened in the past using complex, you know, neural networks to piece together what's happened in the past to make a forecast. And as Emma was just saying, you know, there's advantages and disadvantages of both methods. But having a look at lots of models, I think that's why you would, you know, employ the meteorologist and employ a forecast center like MetDesk because you'd be pulling all this data into one place, analyzing it and then making it easy for the trader to digest that all in one go rather than doing everyone doing it themselves. Having that expertise, think, is key. And also developing products like PowerGen. You can buy all this data from ECWF but you're not getting the direct wind power forecasts coming out. You're not getting, what's my wind farm gonna be producing next week? That's something that is needed to be done, you know, with with people who've got the expertise. And I'm kinda fascinated in this topic that AI is coming into weather as well as the sort of more deterministic models or those kind of equation solving the the chaos in the sky as as Emma would say. The the the are things getting better? Are we like, is there a way of is there a way of saying that in in the long run, like, if I think back say fifteen or twenty years, I could like you know that weather forecasts, they used to be bad or worse and now they are better and I I I maybe There is there is a stat that Is there a stat? Forty years ago, a three day forecast skill. We we're now the seven day forecast skill has the same predictability as a three day forecast forty years ago. So we're astute at forecasting the seven day horizon as we were forty years ago at forecasting a three day horizon. Yeah. Okay. And and is that sort of ramping up as AI then takes takes over parts of the modeling and are are we seeing sort of increased accuracy? I think we are certainly in the in the important seven to fifteen day range, and particularly the ten to twenty day range, that kind of gist on the boundary between where Okay. A lot of weather forecasts tend to drop off in skilled beyond about ten to fifteen days. Yeah. The sort of the cycle of weather systems tends to become more chaotic and less predictable. The AI is almost trying to push the boundaries of that medium range forecast to, you know, beyond what we've ever had. I think me and Emma have still got a job. I think there's still an opportunity for human forecasters to assess the data and and and still come up with a valid view. That's what we're doing day to day. It's I think it's just translating it as well. It's being able to say, okay, there are these models and if you get consensus in the models, then it might work this way. If they're very far apart and it's this type of weather condition, then I'm just gonna say it's kind of sort of like risk risk on risk off type thing. You could say, look, I've got lots of confidence about this forecast. You should take a decision based on this. And there are other times where you might say, look, the models are saying a whole variety of things. You could you could pull the data out of one of those models and AI could tell you go ahead and do this. But I've got the experience of seeing this a few times and when the models don't match up like this, you could be doing something which is a bit a bit silly because there's a bit more context than just say what one model is saying. Is that is that a sort of fair way of describing how people might use it? Yeah. I mean, you learn what models tend to do better with certain things. For an example, just recently, I mean, we've had some quite hot conditions recently and models tend to do a little bit of a shoddy job around this time of year. They sort of under predict. They haven't quite got to that level in terms of the maximum temperatures that are coming through, but some of the AI models are just a little bit quicker at learning around that time. And so we saw quite consistently that the AI models are about a degree warmer around the hot spell that we've literally just seen. And so we were saying, okay, actually the traditional EC model might not ever actually get there, but it's likely that out out turn, which is what we call delivery time That actually you'll see something much closer to the AI. So you sort of get the experience of which one does tend to do better and which scenarios and so you start leaning towards that. The EC model, that was your that was the kind of one of the ways that you were doing it? Yeah. That was just an example, I mean. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So you have a traditional EC, you have an AI EC, so quite often comparing the two against each other. EC stands for? ECMWF, sorry. Oh, which is the European Center for medium weather forecast. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Alright. Look, I I I'm not up to speed on my weather acronym, so you you you have to you have to help me out. And it feels like an obvious place to get this conversation to is around climate change. It feels like the interest in weather is is kind of forever growing because people want to be able to track the impacts of climate change. Is your job getting harder as years go by? And and as in addition to that question, are you also seeing that like a lot of the context that you've learned over say the last ten, twenty, thirty years, you're kind of having to put in the bin because the new weather system is different to the old one? I'm happy take this question being the slightly older member of the team. So I've been forecasting for just over twenty years. And one way in which we do forecasting, especially long range, is we look at historical data. So a little bit like AI, as in we look back at what weather patterns have done before. And there's definitely some evidence that the climate is changing rapidly. I mean, for example, we've seen marine heat waves where the seas become three, four, five, six degrees warmer than normal, normal than the baseline, just off the coast of Europe. And even in the next week, the Mediterranean is gonna be coming back twenty eight or twenty nine degrees. So there's these rapid warm ups of the sea. And we feel that looking at historical data is still valuable, but perhaps there are these cases now where we we can only look at a sort of more recent subset of years. Of course, if you reduce your sample size of years that you're you're comparing, that that that reduces your your usefulness of those skills. So that's called analog forecasting using historical data. Climate change in Western Europe is warming up faster I think than almost anywhere on the planet over the last couple of decades. So when it's hot in Western Europe, we tend to see exceptional differences to to the climate. For example, next week in France, it could be into the forties. We're getting these we're getting these kind of forty degree events in France more and more often there. So it's affecting our forecasting, it's affecting our ability to maybe use historical data, but we're getting massive interest from clients on on these events. And particularly for power, right? So so for for lots of people listening, power generation generally needs water to cool it down. It's kind of how how a lot of reactors work. And if you see forty degree temperatures in France, then you can get to the point where rivers get quite hot. You're only allowed to let rivers get so hot before you kind of cook everything in them. Yep. And so if you if you have this like strong we're kind of too early in the year for this because of a lot of the rivers will be coming from the Alps and so that water will still be quite cold. But as you get later into the year, if that water gets hotter and hotter and hotter, you'd end up not being able to run those power plants as much as you would like to. I also remember a few years ago, we had something in Germany where the the the river level got so low that it was difficult to run barges up. Yeah. Right. And so like there's all these kind of like second order impacts as well that starts to through. I think I'll probably hand to Emma here because she's done a lot of work on Okay. Or even next week, we're getting quite excited about what may happen. Okay. Might be able to hand one of my area of interest. Okay. So with the issue around river levels and things, I mean, we've built we've helped from these guys that built a sort of river temperature model for France, and it is a very we were saying earlier about one of the misconceptions of the weather is that it is a multivariate problem. It's not just I don't know. The temperature's going to forty degrees, and so your temperatures and your rivers are gonna go up. I mean, they will, but, obviously, if your river levels are quite high, it's gonna be slower to react to whether they're really low, and then that warming will be more rapid. And so Okay. You can get that disparity coming through, but I mean, at the moment, we are in a situation where overall, over the Alps, you did see below normal snow over the season, and so that meltwater coming through is actually slightly lower than usual. We've seen some drier spells coming through in towards France. And so, actually, if you look at the levels now, we're not actually that dissimilar to where we were in twenty twenty two, which is that year that you referenced, which was a bit shoddy on those levels. And so, yes, this heat spell coming through, those levels are low, and so you could still see that reaction. And as early as next week, I mean, EDF, who are the sort of transmission system there, are starting to warn of risk, particularly around and towards that sort of southwestern side And on the Lyon River around there, that kind of zone because you are seeing those temperatures coming through. Those rivers are lower, and it's a similar story in the Rhine at the moment. So it's EDF or warning Of nuke curtailment. So that's where you see as you're saying, you have turn the reactors off because you just don't have that cooling water availability. Okay. So you need a certain amount. So about this time last year, we had a similar event actually late June twenty five. So the rain where the river level drops, it doesn't take as much energy to heat up that river Of course. Because there's less less volume. Yeah. And then, yeah, once it gets to the threshold. So we're thinking, yeah, next week, we we'd agree with EDF Yeah. Now. They were predicting a little bit of an earlier onset of threat for curtailment, now they're in line with our initial view. Very good. We're happy with our our initial forecast. I'm sure the the weather team and EDF are listening. And Emma, sorry, interrupted you. You were going to the Rhine, I think. Yeah. I mean, it's a similar story in the Rhine. You had that less snow melt than usual. We've had less heavy precip coming in towards those zones into the Rhine. And so actually coming around onto where, for example, the Cobb or Dasburg Rutt Roy, I'm probably saying this completely wrong. I apologize to any Germans around. But those levels are falling. I mean, at the moment, we're talking about coming down to a meter threshold, which will start be pushing you, I mean, towards those excess freight charges. And so, again, twenty twenty two, we're not too far away from that. We could see a similar dive where we do come below those sorts of fresh out values for more excessive. And those threshold values, they stop power stations pulling in the water or is that more about freights? For the Rhine, it's more freight charges. Okay. So you got four sites coming through and they control the sort of barge that was going through. So there's different levels and there's four zones. Each one has a slightly different Yeah. System, but they in terms of level amounts that they allow free. But if your barge is basically too heavy and the river level's not enough, you're gonna sink it. So it's sort of if you hit a certain level, they'll start reducing the amount you can put on your barge, that's sort of decreasing the traffic to stop that clogging up. We've all learned about how bad it can be when ships like the Evergreen crash into the Suez Canal halfway through. So lesson learned there. I've got one final question for you, Emma. I think I'm coming to you with this. But before I do that, do you ever find that I'm like on a personal note, do ever find that you're like on holiday and you're sort walking past the Rhine and you're like, I could tell you that that the Rhine is eight degrees right now it's like a meter like, do you ever find do do and like, is is this something that you you find in your day to day life? Personally, the sea temperature is massive for me. Okay? You get a text, someone's like, off to Crete next week. Could you let me know Yeah. You know, if it's gonna be a because a, you're thinking about your swimming and b, you're thinking about is this gonna produce loads of rain for the Alps in the autumn once the seas get to twenty eight degrees. So, yeah, it's sort of two things were going on in the program. I would love to think you sort of like have this moonlight role for all of your friends where you're kind of also doing like a personal weather forecast, you know, getting married next spring, could you give me the long range forecast? There's nothing more stressful than a family forecast. Oh, okay. Forget the client forecast. Okay. Good to know. All right, Emma, then I'm gonna come to you. What is a contrarian view you hold about weather modelling and energy systems? Yeah. So mine is to do with sort of headline weather. So for example, a really good example is something like the polar vortex. So that's something about higher levels which propagates down. And quite often, there's this thing that we call a dinosaur chart, but it's sort of like a curve. So it basically averages over northern hemisphere and you take these zonal winds and you average over from the sort of northern hemisphere up, then it basically looks like that. The shape of it looks a bit like a dinosaur. Okay. And and what and what is and and what what's on that chart? What what are the axes? Sorry. So it's zonal wind, so that's your and then you got time down here. And so when you see that dip below zero Yeah. That means that the zonal winds have reversed, which is quite often that's you might have well, you might not have. But in the headlines, that's called as sudden stratospheric warming and SSW, Yeah. Which to most traders then raises quite strong alarm bells of crazy cold in the winter, and so they panic and think, oh my gosh, we got this coming. But the issue is that, as I said, it's averaged over the entire northern hemisphere. It's not telling you the whole story and it brings back to that common misconception question earlier that things are multivariate. So, yes, it could be dropping below zero. That could actually bring your cold frat if it's sort of located and coupled in that zone more so towards the US. And so that then fires up our jet stream, which then brings more sort of low pressure to the north and hotter conditions over Europe. And so actually, you've completely gone with the wrong side because you've seen this SSW panic, basically. Okay. Or you could see it just doesn't couple at all. So a cup was it a couple years ago? Yeah. It was record high in terms of the zonal winds, normally means breezy and nice Yeah. Sort of windy conditions for northern parts of Europe. It just wasn't coupled, so you didn't get that effect. And actually, had that was our Dunkirk Wilde year. Okay. That's the complete opposite. So your contrarian view is that the that the headline the headline piece that sometimes a trader or, like, people who care about the weather, like, from a like, as as their job, they get really attached to this kind of concept of the main thing. But actually the concept of the main thing is potentially really overstating it and that actually what might happen is almost the exact opposite because it may go slightly in a different direction which means that kind of to to the earlier point, it nudges a system, let's say, get good jet stream coming back into Europe. So instead of being sort of record coals record cold period, you're actually gonna get a a sort of much milder period in winter. Yeah. So it's like as soon as we hit September, I would willingly put money on the fad. The clients will start asking us SSW risk and things like this. So I'd happily put money on that fad. And you could say, I mean, last year, we were saying, yes, it's above normal climatologically. However, that doesn't tell you the whole story and you have to really hit that home because they're all going away thinking, oh, it's gonna be a nice cold winter, we're gonna get on this now, but actually that might not be the case and it's not Yeah. Until sort of close to the time that you start seeing things like, could we see that coupling coming through and so it being impactful or could that be more I think it all all links back to something called the beast from the east, which you may have heard of Yes. In March twenty eighteen where there was one of these sudden stratospheric warmings, a very powerful one that had a almost a textbook response. So we have this event that Emma was talking about in the atmosphere higher up. The stratosphere is the next level up from the troposphere where we all all the weather occurs, but it can connect down and couple down. And and that did couple down and we ended up with a huge easterly wind and the gas price shot up, massive demand for for heating. And of course, everyone thinks about that event of, could it happen again? And of course, since then, we've never seen anything quite as dramatic, but there's always that threat. So I think that's what makes traders trigger when they hear this term SSW, as Emma was saying. People have that sort of like more near term bias around it. They remember the beasts and yeasts. Yes. It also rolls off the tongue very nicely. Yeah. But of course, our job is to present data and and sort of say, well, the beast from the east was actually the coldest impact we've ever had from an SSW in the last forty years. We've never had anything quite as dramatic as that. So we have to show that these opposite cases, the US may end up with some of the cold, we may go really mild. And it's just sort of being aware of the the dynamics of the atmosphere. So we do a lot of research on that Okay. And to help our clients. I hope it's come across I've loved this episode. I've learned a huge amount and I feel as I said right at the start we could have gone on for way longer but we have to draw it to a close. Emma, Matt, thank you very much for coming on. You've been fantastic guests. I've learned a huge amount about weather. I'm sure our listeners have too and we are looking out for the record El Nino later on this year. Great. Thanks Ed. Thank you for having us.