CW3E Invited to Present at the California Utility Forecasting Meeting

June 25, 2019

Meredith Fish and Eric Pytlak of Bonneville Power Administration and fellow Penn State alumni. The meeting was hosted in Southern California Edison’s Emergency Operations Center.

CW3E collaborator Dr. Dan Cayan, CW3E graduate student Meredith Fish, and Dr. Laura Engeman were invited by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) to present at the annual California Utility Forecasting Meeting (CUFM) hosted by Southern California Edison in Irwindale, CA. CUFM is an annual gathering of meteorologists from the utilities, select universities, and government agencies like the National Weather Service and US Forest Service. This meeting brings together West Coast utility companies such as SDG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and Bonneville Power Administration to discuss internal advances in fire weather modeling and forecasting, monitoring networks, and load forecasting. Dr. Cayan and Ms. Fish discussed climate change impacts and atmospheric rivers respectively. Dr. Laura Engeman, from the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptations at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), discussed sea level rise. Each SIO representative focused their presentations on specific issues facing utility companies such as more frequent wildfires, impactful and difficult to forecast phenomena such as narrow cold frontal rainbands, and sea level rise impacting distribution centers.