Invited Speaker in Climate Linked Economics: Examining Financial Impacts to New York State Due to Impactful Weather

New York State (NYS) is arguably the most weather diverse state in the entire country. While it may not be the first state one considers when they imagine hurricanes or blizzards or floods or severe thunderstorms, NYS is able to experience effectively any type of temperate region weather imaginable. In fact, it is the only state that can have a direct hurricane landfall as well as lake effect snow impacting its shorelines. This diversity of weather hazards places great strain of public and private sector entities which are impacted by weather.

Most public and private sector organizations lack an on-staff meteorologist, which presents a variety of challenges both within those organizations as well as when viewed holistically across organizations. Perhaps the most obvious challenge relates to proper interpretation of weather information. For example, if an electric utility lacks a meteorologist, are they able to properly calibrate the need to purchase outside assistance in advance of an upcoming storm? These types of decisions may be worth millions of dollars. NYS is fortunate to have a world-class weather observing system (the NYS Mesonet), which is likewise difficult to fully utilize for non-meteorologists. Much like private companies, government organizations frequently make potentially extremely expensive decisions. One example centers around responses to winter weather events: Do you pretreat roads? Should resources be moved across the state? Should critical roadways be closed due to the severity of the storm? These types of questions may be expensive in a political sense as well as financial.

To counter this traditional lack of institutional meteorological knowledge within organizations, many seek to fill this gap in one of several ways such as by hiring an outside private sector weather vendor and/or seeking stronger relationships with their local NWS office where possible. A growing number of organizations have also come to recognize the value in having dedicated meteorologists on staff or on call in some capacity. However, a patchwork approach across sectors can complicate preparation in other ways, which may increase financial impacts. Consider a hypothetical significant storm impacting New York City: while they may each have somewhat unique foci, the local electric utility, transportation authorities, emergency management office (etc) all have largely the same interests when it comes to understanding the weather. However, if they each use a different source of weather information – such as a combination of NWS, private weather vendors, and on-staff meteorologists – coming to collective agreement on what the forecast is may be difficult, which may hamper coordination if needed.

This presentation will examine some examples of the challenges discussed above and describe some of the ways NYS and the University at Albany is helping address these weather challenges in a cost-efficient way. UAlbany sports twin state-funded entities: (1) a Center of Excellence in Weather & Climate Analytics which primarily works with the state’s private sector, and (2) a newly created State Weather Risk Communication Center which serves the state’s public sector emergency management needs. The roles, aspirations, and impacts of both organizations will be discussed in this presentation.