Help - Fantasy Flow Reports
About Fantasy Flows
On the Dreamflows Realtime and Daily reports, flow entries are:
- Gauge data or scheduled releases - assumed to be accurate data.
- Rating table conversions, estimates or informal utility projections - possibly inaccurate projections but nevertheless useful most of the time.
- Reservoir calculations - expect short-term inaccuracies, but they are generally reliable when averaged long-term.
Fantasy Flows reports data of the above flow types for the current day, plus predicted flows up to three days into the future.
These predictions are labeled fant on the report and should be considered highly suspect, especially more than a day or two out.
Fantasy predictions are based on both current environmental conditions (like snowpack or recent rainfall),
and expected future conditions (such as predicted weather).
As you know, it's common for weather reports to be totally wrong when it comes to specifics such as timing and quantity of heat or precipitation.
Given that fant entries are based more and more on predicted weather the farther into the future they go,
expect fant entries to be more and more unreliable the farther into the future they go.
Having said which: when interpreted appropriately, Fantasy flows can be very useful.
In the same way that the weather report might tell you that it's likely to rain tomorrow,
Fantasy Flows might tell you that the North Fork American is likely to have boatable flows tomorrow.
The accents here are on "likely" and "boatable" ... the actual flow will almost certainly be different from the predicted flow,
perhaps radically different, but chances are reasonable that it will still be close enough that you can boat and have fun anyway.
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