Natural-gas storage/weather residual — literature and claim boundary

By Arhan Canli, Canli Capital

Reviewed: 2026-08-16
Research state: source feasibility only; no futures prices or returns opened.

Economic mechanism

Weekly working-gas inventory changes combine weather-driven demand, production, imports/exports, and operational flows. A storage change is economically informative only relative to what was knowable before the storage week. The candidate therefore asks whether a first-release EIA storage residual—after conditioning on a frozen NOAA ensemble forecast—contains short-lived information not captured by natural-gas trend or curve carry.

The forecast vintage is load-bearing. Using observed weather, a later model rerun, revised EIA history, or an analyst consensus collected after the storage week would turn the test into a different and potentially look-ahead-biased identity.

Prior evidence and limitations

EIA's Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report is an official weekly estimate with published sampling uncertainty, revision policy, and a standard Thursday release convention with holiday exceptions. Current history is not automatically first-release history.
NOAA's public GEFS archive contains timestamped ensemble forecast runs. Model/version and file layout changed materially in September 2020, so one contemporary path cannot be projected backward.
Mu (2007), Weather, storage, and natural gas price dynamics, documents the joint importance of weather and inventories for natural-gas prices. It motivates conditioning but does not establish a modern executable event sleeve. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2006.04.003

Original studies and government data do not supply ALPHAC's required first-release hashes, forecast-vintage manifest, futures rolls, bid/ask execution, limit events, capacity, untouched holdout, family-wise DSR, or portfolio-diversification evidence.

Official sources

EIA WNGSR current report and machine-readable files: https://ir.eia.gov/ngs/ngs.html
EIA methodology: https://ir.eia.gov/ngs/methodology.html
EIA revision policy: https://ir.eia.gov/ngs/revisions.html
EIA release schedule: https://ir.eia.gov/ngs/schedule.html
NOAA GEFS archive: https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-gefs/
CME Henry Hub Natural Gas futures: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/natural-gas/natural-gas.html

Family-wise trial accounting

This candidate overlaps the already killed commodity_inventory_seasonal petroleum identity. The new weather-conditioned storage residual is a distinct configuration, not a fresh family. If returns are ever opened, the family trial count starts at at least two, the prior negative result remains published, and no sign flip or product substitution erases it.