What we predict

The change in Lower-48 natural gas in storage, in Bcf, for the week ending Friday, as published in the EIA Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report the following Thursday at 10:30 ET. We also label it a build, a withdrawal, or flat. Flat means a change of less than 5 Bcf either way.

How the number is built

We start from the seasonal naive: the average change for the same week of the year in earlier years. The model then predicts how far this week will land from that baseline. It is a ridge regression on standardized inputs, retrained on point-in-time data, so every training row uses only what was known at the time.

Inputs the model uses:

• EIA storage level
• Versus 5-year average
• Year-over-year
• Weeks since report
• National HDD/CDD versus normal

We tested and dropped: cot oscillator and prior-week residual.

Data sources

• EIA Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report: levels, net change, five-year average, year-over-year.
• NOAA heating and cooling degree days, weighted to demand hubs, versus normal.

When the call is locked

The decision clock is Wednesday end of day ET, before the Thursday release. The call on the scorecard is the last one we published by then. Anything published after 10:30 ET Thursday is ignored, so the record cannot be improved with hindsight. Each call shows its publish time and a SHA-256 fingerprint of what was published.

How it is graded

Every call is compared with the EIA print, with the seasonal naive, and with the street consensus once we have captured it for that week. We report root-mean-square error, mean absolute error, and how often the direction was right, over the last 8 and 26 weeks.

A new model replaces the live one only if it beats the seasonal naive on both Bcf error and direction in a walk-forward test over about two seasons. We will not say the call beats the street until it has done so over at least 26 weeks of captured consensus.

What we do not do

• We do not publish or sell a natural gas price forecast. A next-day price model is in research and is not live.
• We do not edit a call after it is published, or drop weeks we got wrong.
• We do not mix backtest results into the live record.

Update history

• Sep 3, 2026: Current model went live (residual ridge, schema v3). It replaced a model whose walk-forward error was about 142 Bcf against a seasonal naive near 45 Bcf.
• Oct 2026: Public scorecard and this page published.