TELL sample forcing data

This dataset contains sample data forcing data for the Total Electricity Loads (TELL) model developed by the IM3 project. More information about the TELL model can be found at: https://immm-sfa.github.io/tell/user_guide.html.

The sample dataset includes five years of historical weather data (2015-2019) and four years of sample future data (2039, 2059, 2079, and 2099). The 2015-2019 data is based on historical meteorology simulated by WRF. In contrast, the sample future data comes from IM3's future WRF runs under the RCP 8.5 climate scenario with SSP5 population forcing. The weather data was generated by the sequence of processing scripts that convert the meteorology from IM3's climate simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model into input files ready for use in TELL. The first step in the processing chain spatially averages the gridded meteorology output from WRF into county mean values. The output of that processing step is a series of .csv files (one for every hour processed) with the county-mean value of six meteorological variables: T2, Q2, U10, V10, SWDOWN, and GLW. The second step then takes these county-level hourly values and population-weights them into an annual time-series for each of the balancing authorities (BAs) used in the TELL model. The code used to generate this sample weather data and more information about the wrf_to_tell processing pipeline can be found at: https://github.com/IMMM-SFA/im3components.

The dataset also contains a sample output file from the United States version of the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM-USA) and two future county-level population projections that can be used in the TELL quickstarter notebook.