Will Holmgren

Assistant Research Professor
Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences
University of Arizona
holmgren@arizona.edu

Projects

This following is a list of my professional activities, but none of it would be possible without a large number of great people that I am lucky to be able to work with.

I am the PI of a project to create an open source framework for solar forecast evaluations, the Solar Forecast Arbiter. The work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office under Award Number DE-EE0008214.

I co-administer the pvlib python project, an open source Python library for solar energy modeling (github, documentation).

I make solar and wind power forecasts for utilities in the Southwest US using data from the UA high resolution regional weather model, satellite imagery, and rooftop solar panel generation. I advised Tony Lorenzo's papers on network forecasts of solar irradiance and optimal interpolation of satellite imagery for solar irradiance resource assessment, Travis Harty's paper on an ensemble Kalman filter for intra-hour cloud forecasts, and Patrick Bunn's paper on assessing GEOS-5 aerosol data for improving operational solar forecasts. Learn more about our forecasting work at forecasting.energy.arizona.edu.

I collaborated with the SVERI utilities to produce a report on solar and wind power variability over 6 months in the Southwest based on utility generation data. The report presents novel analysis of how solar and wind variability depends on the time of day and time of year in the Southwest U.S. The public version of the report is available here.

I led a team in creating sveri.energy.arizona.edu, an interactive website that showed real-time generation and load data from 7 utilities in the Southwest US. The page is now retired.

With collaborators at the Climate Assessment for the Southwest and Tucson Electric Power, I created a simple open source framework for analyzing the consistency of TEP's portfolio's submitted under its 2020 Integrated Resource plan. See the code here.

I created precip-d3, an interactive website that explores the impact of El Niño on seasonal rainfall in Tucson, AZ (or any gauge in the RCC-ACIS system!).

I earned my Ph.D. in 2013 by measuring atomic properties with an atom interferometer in Dr. Alex Cronin's group at the University of Arizona Department of Physics. I published measurements of polarizabilities, a measurement of the first tune-out wavelength of potassium, and a new technique to measure the velocity of an atom beam. My thesis provides more background, reanalysis, and supplementary materials for these papers. I developed tools and techniques and played an advisory role for refined measurements of polarizabilities and several other papers. See atomwave.org, my atom interferometry repository, or my CV for more information on my Ph.D. research (and links to non-paywalled articles).

Other

I'm @wholmgren on GitHub.

I'm @willholmgren on Twitter.

My probably out of date CV (pdf).

Hiking, rock climbing, biking from A to B.

Open source

Collaborators

Solar Forecast Arbiter: Tony Lorenzo, Leland Boeman, Cliff Hansen (Sandia), Aidan Tuohy (Electric Power Research Institute), Justin Sharp (Sharply Focused), David Larson (EPRI), Adam Wigington (EPRI), Tassos Golnas (DOE SETO)

Forecasting at UA: Mike Leuthold, Tony Lorenzo, Leland Boeman, Travis Harty, Matti Morzfeld, Chris Castro, Patrick Bunn, Eric Betterton, Ardeth Barnhart, Alex Cronin, Yang Cao, Chang Ki Kim, Daniel Cormode, Rey Granillo, Mike Eklund

pvlib python: Cliff Hansen, Mark Mikofski, Kevin Anderson, and many other contributors to the project.

Atomic physics: Alex Cronin, Vincent Lonij, Ivan Hromada, Raisa Trubko, Maxwell Gregoire