enron's new weather system, courtesy the research dept.

V

Last night, I tested our new system for real-time surveillance and messaging
of the weather, and it delivers the data to desktops throughout the building
more than 6 1/2 minutes before the National Weather Service updates their
webpages. Our current technology was web-scraping these pages via ftp, then
parsing into a database. The impact of these 6 1/2 minutes for the hourly
power traders is enormous- the weather stations upload their data around 53
minutes after the hour, and we can now receive them within 2 minutes later.
We can now re-estimate our nonlinear stack model before the top of the hour,
when hourly power trading begins. Otherwise, we would not have model results
until around 15 minutes after the hour. Notably, hourly power trading is, for
all intents and purposes, concluded by then (they trade for 10-15 minutes and
manage the scheduling for the next 30 or so miutes). So, effectively, we may
now be one *hour* ahead of where we were just a few days ago, in terms of
information. People are very excited up here, from the CTO on down- thanks
for letting it happen.

C