PG&E weather stations - live cams

On May 30, the California Public Utilities Commission will vote on PG&E’s proposal that includes the construction of hundreds of new weather stations across its Northern California territory. The company’s wildfire plan could cost billions of dollars.

California’s rich landscape of rolling hills and steep canyons has potentially hundreds of thousands of microclimates, which makes fire prediction an incredible challenge. That’s why PG&E wants to build a dense network of weather stations, which they hope will illuminate the humidity, wind speed, and temperature of Northern California’s varied landscape.

In 2010, SDG&E installed a weather station in every circuit of its territory that had a high risk of fire, and in 2011, they added more. Meteorologists say that information derived from the stations dramatically improved their understanding of local weather patterns and has aided in their predictions of wildfire behavior.

On May 23, wildfire legislation - two bills compel the state to coordinate with PG&E and other utilities on where weather stations are deployed. They also create a state wildfire warning center and a fire threat potential index.

PG&E’s proposal includes:

installing an estimated 1,300 new weather stations by 2022. Currently, the utility has just over 350 weather stations Additionally, weather data will be publicly available.
fixing approximately 600 high-definition cameras across its territory. Thirty cameras are working now.

Fire detection capabilities provided by NOAA’s GOES-R series satellites, which rotate in sync with the Earth and scan California once a minute, and from three polar orbiting satellites — NASA’s Aqua, Terra, and VIIRS — that pass over the state each day. The utility’s meteorologists will use the satellites to identify when a wildfire breaks out in near real time. This is helpful, if not groundbreaking (the cameras and lookout towers can, too). But, in filings with the CPUC, PG&E says it will pilot a system that disseminates alerts through an web application and emails to its team. For now, those alerts will stay in house, but PG&E’s meteorologists hope to notify fire agencies and the public, in the future.

177 weather stations across San Diego County and parts of Orange County — meteorologists discovered that strong winds reached speeds upwards of 100 mph on the hill and mountain slopes. That led the utility to replace some wood poles with steel poles and install stronger wires, in places, to better withstand the extreme winds.

PG&E weather station link red flag “snooper” : https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mtr/fire_weather2/fm_new.php?wfo=MTR&net=227

1 Like