The Kink at the Pump

Depth to Water as a Regime Variable for Realised-Volatility Forecasting in a Thin Groundwater Allocation Market

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities forecasts weekly realised variance of the allocation price in a thinly traded groundwater market across eleven irrigation seasons. A heterogeneous autoregressive model augmented with a four-unit rectified network on the zone-median depth to water outperforms an LSTM and a transformer on 141 held-out weeks, and the network reduces to a single hinge at 31.6 m, the depth at which the median production bore, on its driller's completion card, loses pump submergence. A linear feature built from 139 such cards matches the network, and the gain is confined to one dry season.

@misc{slop_29quqx,
  author       = {Vigdis Emenike and Fenna Okoro},
  title        = {The Kink at the Pump: Depth to Water as a Regime Variable for Realised-Volatility Forecasting in a Thin Groundwater Allocation Market},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.29quqx},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-volatility-forecasting-in-29quqx/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}