Severe weather can pose major issues for utilities, including service disruptions caused by high winds, flooding rain, lightning and more. Utilities in wildfire-prone areas may institute public safety power shutoffs in order to lessen the risk of fire and equipment damage. Though severe weather can happen at any time, April 1 is often considered the start of severe weather season—and now more than ever, utilities need reliable, accessible weather information to keep their staff safe and operations running smoothly.
Synoptic Data, a Public Benefit Corporation committed to advancing environmental data accessibility, works closely with utility companies to empower decision-makers by ensuring they have access to the data they need to manage risk. Synoptic says its platform “delivers high-resolution, real-time and historical weather and environmental data at scale, supporting critical decisions across public safety, infrastructure, research and operations.”
Drawing on experience across the private weather sector and insights from Synoptic’s work with utilities, Melanie Scott—meteorologist and director of marketing and communications for Synoptic Data—outlined several key weather data considerations utilities should evaluate to improve timely decision-making during severe weather. Her perspective across both meteorology and communications gives her insight into the importance of data and detection networks in the industry. POWER connected with Scott to discuss how utility companies can leverage real-time weather data to prepare for and respond to severe weather events.
POWER: What data are utilities missing when it comes to the risk of extreme weather? Would access to additional networks or variables provide better insights?
Scott: All utilities use weather data and there are likely multiple weather networks they are already accessing. However, there may be networks with useful information that a utility was not aware of or had difficulty accessing. As a meteorologist, I know first-hand that additional datasets are always welcome. Real-time data helps you verify what’s happening “in the field” and provides added confidence in your observations and forecasts. The key is accessing data from multiple networks—including those in complex terrain and/or with neighborhood-level observations—all in one platform. Having myriad datasets is great, but spending time viewing the various data in different locations slows decision-making, which can exacerbate severe weather situations that are already dangerous for the community and challenging for utilities.
In This Issue
Full issueIt’s also critical that utilities leverage the types of information that are most important to their operations. For example, monitoring wind gusts is important when deciding to proactively shut off power. Having access to wind, precipitation, visibility, or cloud cover, for example, provides insights that help utilities focus on their service territory and customer usage.
An important consideration for utilities is also ensuring they have quality-controlled weather data. Quality-controlled data means erroneous values are flagged, indicating that the particular value is suspicious and may not be useful for decisions. Knowing you have accurate data ensures confidence in your decisions and that your customers can be confident in them, too.
POWER: Between monitoring for downed power lines and fire weather and ignition risk, what data does a utility need to make informed decisions?
Scott: Other than the typical wind speed and direction data, monitoring wind gusts can give utilities an advantage by informing forecasters of changing conditions that can lead to fire risks like downed power lines. Wind gusts are another parameter that requires quality-checked data, especially since they can fluctuate widely over short distances.
Beyond wind, forecasters may appreciate access to additional data variables, such as fuel moisture, to drive decisions. This is a critical input for fire weather forecasting because vegetation essentially acts as fuel, and how wet or dry that fuel is determines how readily it will ignite and how intensely it will burn. This data is useful for assessing fire risk, as part of issuing red flag warnings, or in fire behavior modeling.
POWER: Are utilities gathering wind data from the correct locations, and are utilities using historical context alongside real-time data to understand the impacts of a high-wind event?
Scott: All utilities gather wind data, but the number of stations and locations from which they collect varies. The more weather data you have, the better, so any and all locations from which utilities can gather data are the correct ones. What’s crucial is being able to access real-time, high-quality data from multiple networks across a utility’s entire service—aggregated into a single platform—to ensure they can see how conditions are changing minute by minute and respond efficiently and effectively.
Historical data, however, is often underutilized by utilities, but those who use it are finding great value in comparing real-time wind gust data alongside historical context.
For example, according to December 2025 data from Synoptic Data’s Weather API, more than 1,000 stations in the Mountain West reported wind gusts above the 99.5th percentile of their historical daily maximum distributions. That means that the winds these areas experienced were well above average, noting a significant wind event.
When historical context is incorporated into operations and modeling in conjunction with real-time data, it provides an added level of situational awareness. Wind storms are not uncommon, and understanding their impact on infrastructure—and leveraging historical context to interpret evolving weather patterns—can give utilities a clear operational advantage.
POWER: Why should a utility’s weather approach go beyond a forecast?
Scott: Forecasts informed by models and experience can help utilities plan, and tools such as radar are used when severe weather is moving in, but what happens when the storm is occurring? That’s where real-time data at the ground level is essential.
If your utility is facing potential flooding, it’s critical to have insights like real-time precipitation, stream flow, and gauge height to monitor for rapidly rising waters and weather stations that have gone offline. In emergencies like this, conditions can change in an instant. Having access to real-time observations and notifications about weather variables crossing thresholds gives forecasters the information to make decisions quickly. Again, the more data, the better!
POWER: How can utilities ensure that the right people on their team have the best access to alerts and critical information? If they don’t, how does that impact response time?
Scott: Without automated alerts, changing weather conditions could go unnoticed—even if only for a few minutes. During a severe storm, every minute that passes without action means a higher risk to public safety and property.
Every decision-maker on a utility’s team needs access to notifications and as much information as possible to optimize response time. If you have an operations team that monitors conditions, I’d recommend ensuring they can easily access data, set notifications for thresholds such as wind gusts, and view multiple datasets in one place to evaluate changing conditions.
POWER: How can utilities ensure they are learning from every event to improve each subsequent response? What intelligence will help utilities analyze their post-event weather events and improve future planning?
Scott: Just because a storm has ended doesn’t mean that the analysis should. Conducting a review after the weather event informs future planning, including refining shutoff criteria, adjusting strategies, and updating models. Teams can analyze where a storm had the greatest impact on their service area and use nearby weather station data to understand how hyperlocal conditions affected customers. For example, did certain stations observe more precipitation or stronger winds? If so, did that contribute to outages? Leveraging historical context to analyze a storm can also help teams plan for the future by revealing whether a storm met or exceeded previous observational records.
Assessing how infrastructure performed under extreme weather conditions can also help utilities better understand how to prepare and react to minimize repairs and service disruptions when the next storm comes. Having a response plan in place before the next storm strikes, with real-time, quality-checked data and historical context to back it up, is critical for every utility.
From risk management to long-term resilience, utilities need high-quality, real-time weather data to operate smoothly during severe weather. Now is the time to ask questions about your utility’s data coverage, decision workflows and historical knowledge. In situations where conditions can change by the minute, your team needs as much data as possible—aggregated into a single, accessible source—to react quickly and confidently to keep communities safe.
—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER.
