using loadcomp with highly skewed observations; suggest absolute residuals

Hi @aappling-usgs I'm working with Bill to compute some load estimates and we noticed that for some solutes we have very low values much of the time. Below the detection limit so we are using 1/2 the detection limit (2.5 ug/L), for example with NH4 we report this 192 out of 313 samples. occasionally you jump from 2.5 ug/L to >100 ug/L in the next sample. When using the relative residuals this seems to cause our load values to spike to unreasonable values. I was also getting out of memory errors when attempting to aggregate the predictions. Using the absolute residual option seemed to alleviate this problem. I found this same issue for several other solutes.

Bottom line; Maybe we should suggest using absolute residuals for observations with highly skewed distributions?