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I have been less enthusiastic about predicting if the Dolores will have a raftable release this year due to an average snowpack. In January there was a potential for a release when the model was predicting 20 days. But other than that the model has been fairly pessimistic. In the last couple of days the model has had some really high predictions, above 40 days. I think either the model thinks that we are close to having enough snow to have a release or there was some sort of weird reading at the snotel sites. Either way, I would say that there is a chance the Dolores runs this year, but I'd guess it is unlikely.

I need to get some data hosted through Google Earth Engine. I’ve played around with the javacript and python libraries, but at heart I’m an R developer and would prefer to use earth engine in R if I can.

It's been quite the year. By far the biggest in my life. I raised a baby from newborn to toddler, I got a new job with the Forest Service, leaving the BLM and my Dolores office after 15 years, moved from Dolores to Durango, demolished a house, and designed and started building a new house. That is a lot of big things and at times it felt like too many big things. But I'm happy for all of them.

I’ve long wanted to get better at statistics. And largely I have. But I still have a long way to go. I feel like I’m the best at machine learning type stuff, mostly using decision trees. The predictions seem to be the best. But I’m not really in to prediction as much as I am into learning about the relationships that exist in the world. A lot of machine learning is a black box.

I write a lot of R in my life. I’m also a web developer that does most of my writing on this blog in markdown. Up until now these two worlds have been separate. I know and use Rmarkdown at work to write reports but, it always has seemed like a pain to get Rmarkdown to work on this site which is generated using 11ty (Eleventy). Up until now, to get my R work on this site, I have been writing R in another document and manually copying over code and outputs to markdown files. Given how inefficient that process is, I figured it was time to figure out how to write Rmarkdown and render it more seamlessly with this site.

This post includes just the running prediction of if the Dolores River will have a raftable release below McPhee Dam this winter. This is a post with just the results from a much longer post I put up a few days ago. This prediction is an update to the model I made in the previous post. The only thing I updated is I didn't know that you could run XGboost regression as count/Poisson, which looks to be much more accurate (which makes sense).