Integration of High-Resolution Weather Data to Combat Wildfires and Extreme Weather Events for Utility Applications

In 2017, the state of California experienced 9,560 wildfires which burned through a staggering 1.3 million acres of land. Included in these figures was the Thomas Fire, one of California’s worst wildfires on record, which destroyed over 1,000 structures and claimed the lives of two people. It is becoming transparent that an increase in extreme weather over recent years, largely in part to stronger wind events, has caused a significant increase in the both the frequency and severity of wildfires. Unfortunately, electric utilities are typically the main culprit in the initiation or spreading of these fires due to equipment failure or poor vegetation management. Faced with numerous, costly lawsuits and steep regulatory pressure, a large California utility was in critical need of a solution that would help the utility better predict, monitor, and visualize hyper-local weather conditions that are prone to causing asset failure or interruption. Utilizing weather data from The Weather Company (TWC) and integration services from IBM Services, the utility is now able to improve storm preparedness and response for wildfire events, as well as other severe weather phenomena.

IBM's geospatial weather solution is a powerful situational awareness solution that provides the utility visibility into how forecasted and real-time weather impact the daily operations of critical utility assets such as substations, circuits, and transformers. The solution integrates weather data from TWC into the utility’s ESRI geospatial platform which now sits on IBM Cloud. The solution also includes report automation and custom alerting capabilities which greatly reduces analysis time for the in-house meteorologists and storm directors. Weather data from TWC is a key differentiator in the solution which includes an industry-leading forecast resolution of 500 square meters, forecast updates every 15 minutes, and an observational network of over 250,000 weather stations. For the past six years, TWC has been ranked the number one most accurate forecast provider in the world.

The presentation will first discuss the motivation for the project and will be followed by an overview of the situational awareness solution. Technical components will then be discussed which will highlight the big data infrastructure needed to support the application. After screenshots of the application are shared, the presentation will conclude with a summary and recommendations for future work.