QuantumWeatherŽ Helping the Electric Industry become Weather-Ready

Many utility companies use specialized forecasting services to help them respond to weather related events. Saint Louis University has partnered with AmerenMissouri to create QuantumWeatherŽ, a unique weather-based decision support system. Rather than providing a weather forecast that allows a utility to respond to a weather event, QuantumWeatherŽ allows a utility a way to prepare for a weather event, by pre-positioning equipment and crews to where the most damage to the utilities infrastructure may occur. In collaboration with Saint Louis University AmerenMissouri created the QuantumWeather mesonet. Composed of 100 station surface stations with an average spacing of 10km, reporting once a minute and three launch on demand mobile radiosondes, data from this mesonet is assimilated into a mesoscale model creating a high spatial and temporal resolution forecast. This forecast is combined with the locations of the utility's assets, and factors that affect AmerenMissouri's infrastructure to create a heat map of damage probabilities that evolves over time. This heat map provides AmerenMissouri the ability to plan a response to a weather related outage rather than respond to a weather related outage. In operation for over 8 years QuantumWeatherŽ has proven its ability to make AmerenMissouri Weather-Ready.