Are you a ‘weather geek’? PG&E tracks rain, wind and wildfires online

My father and our agrarian neighbors often spoke in “weather almanac” language. They talked about average rainfall or high and low daily temperatures that were expected.

If it was early in the year, they attempted to predict the last morning freeze before planting their gardens with the hope of ripened tomatoes by the Fourth of July.

Perhaps that was one reason, along with my love for maps, that I became so interested in weather.

If you’re a weather or map geek, PG&E has now installed more than 600 weather stations and 130 high-definition (HD) cameras across Northern and Central California as part of its Community Wildfire Safety Program.

PG&E will continue to expand these networks in high fire-threat areas to enhance weather forecasting and modeling and improve its ability to predict and respond to extreme wildfire danger.

By 2022, PG&E plans to have installed 1,300 weather stations and 600 HD cameras — a density of one weather station roughly every 20 circuit-miles and video coverage of approximately 90% within the highest fire-risk areas.

So far along the Central Coast, about 100 weather stations have been installed.

These station observations are available to state and local agencies as well as the public, through online sources such as pge.com/weather on the PG&E’s website, at the National Weather Service and MesoWest at https://mesowest.utah.edu.

Weather enthusiasts will find a lot to like about the PG&E Weather page.

With PG&E’s weather map at your fingertips, you will be able to check humidity, precipitation, temperatures, wind speeds and wind gusts across 70,000 square miles of Northern and Central California from thousands of weather stations and dozens of high-definition cameras in use by PG&E.

Additionally, the map shows whether the National Weather Service has called a red flag warning and where.

The page also offers a seven-day look-ahead regional forecast, which is updated daily by a PG&E meteorologist or fire scientist that indicates the potential need to call a public safety power shutoff.

A map of the United States is displayed when you visit the MesoWest website, operated by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah.

Choose California by clicking on the state. On the left-hand side of the page, under “Data Selection,” choose all net networks on the pull-down menu, then click on the red “Refresh Map” button. After a minute or two, hundreds of weather stations will be displayed.

You can zoom into the Central Coast by clicking the plus button on the upper lefthand side of the page, or by clicking on our region.

Move your cursor over any weather station and click on it. You will see a 24-hour graph of temperature and relative humidity and other atmospheric measurements such as wind speed and direction if selected.

Above the weather chart is the current “Weather Conditions” and “24-hour Max/Min Events.” You can also download all the historical data available at each station.

This data is critical for PG&E’s meteorologist and analysts in the Wildfire Safety Operations Center, the hub where the company monitors threats across its service territory and coordinates with first responders and public safety officials to respond to emerging threats.

PG&E is adding a new tool to its arsenal to fight wildfires called fire-spread modeling. It will process gigabytes of historical, real-time and forecasted weather, vegetation moisture and fuel loading levels, and other parameters per day.

To learn more, please visit PG&E Currents at www.pgecurrents.com and view the story “Fire-Spread Modeling Program Shows Where a Wildfire May Go Before It Gets There, for Quicker, More Accurate Decisions” by Jennifer Robison. It’s a fascinating read.

This story was originally published June 2, 2020 at 5:05 AM.