"So far, Strenfel said, addressing a virtual audience during a PG&E broadcast Wednesday, the company has installed more than 1,600 weather stations that help meteorologists like him track wind, temperatures and humidity across its service area in California, which he said is 70,000 square miles, mostly in Northern California, but also parts of Southern California. So many of these stations are needed, Strenfel said, because a lot of weather can happen in those square miles, because of the state's varied topography,"
"To get forecasts that are as accurate as possible, Strenfel said all 1,617 weather stations are not only sending out information every 10 minutes on current conditions, but PG&E has also created machine learning models, such as the Fire Potential Index, which Strenfel described as probably one of our most crucial models, as it's predicting that if we were to have an ignition, what is the probability of that ignition becoming a large, catastrophic fire from any ignition source."
The 2017 Tubbs Fire prompted Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to install more than 1,600 weather stations and implement Public Safety Power Shutoffs to reduce wildfire risk. The stations report wind, temperature, and humidity every ten minutes across a 70,000-square-mile service area that includes varied topography and thousands of micro-climates. The network provides dense, localized observations to improve forecast accuracy. Machine-learning models, including the Fire Potential Index, analyze near-term forecasts and 30 years of hourly historical data to estimate the probability that an ignition would develop into a large, catastrophic fire.
Read at www.ukiahdailyjournal.com
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