The Weather Team that Helps Keep the Lights On

SCE’s meteorologists provide accurate forecasts and are critical to a reliable supply of power for customers.
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Stories : Safety
Stories : Safety

The Weather Team that Helps Keep the Lights On

SCE’s meteorologists provide accurate forecasts and are critical to a reliable supply of power for customers.
Contributors
Photo Credit: Ernesto Sanchez
Video Credit: Ernesto Sanchez, Joseph Foulk and Alfredo Coello
 

When Harrison Prieto was growing up in southeastern Louisiana in the early 2000s, weather was a critical part of his life. A series of relentless tropical storms and hurricanes caused flooding, damage to homes, downed trees and power outages. Then came Hurricane Katrina.

“When Katrina hit in 2005, we stayed. And that was just such a formative experience because there’s the raw power of nature and then you watch so many people struggling and you think, ‘I need to figure out how this happened, what is making this happen and how we can improve on it?’” Prieto said.

Prieto brings a lifelong passion for meteorology to Southern California Edison, where, as one of the newest members of SCE’s growing Weather Services team, he is now dealing with an entirely different climate.

SCE meteorologist Harrison Prieto brings a wind range of experience to the Weather Services team, including serving as team captain of the 2021 Florida State University men's basketball team.
SCE meteorologist Harrison Prieto's interest in weather forecasting was heightened when he witnessed the impacts of Hurricane Katrina while growing up in Louisiana.

“The weather out here offers a whole new challenge for me, figuring out how the mountains are going to impact my weather forecast,” Prieto said. “And I’m learning snow level forecasting, which has been really interesting."

His timing couldn’t have been better. SCE meteorologists have been at the forefront of the company’s response to an unprecedented series of winter storms this year.

“The need for meteorologists to provide briefings and forecasts has been growing, not only because we have a growing population, but climate change is also making some of these storms even more severe than they were in the past,” said Paul Roller, SCE Weather Services senior manager. “When I first joined the company in 2008, we were only focused on forecasting temperatures for SCE’s energy procurement functions.”

Jacqueline Bennett was a television meteorologist before joining SCE's Weather Services team in 2022.
Jacqueline Bennett was a television meteorologist before joining SCE's Weather Services team in 2022.

Now the weather team produces a daily threat level matrix measuring from zero to five the likelihood of serious consequences from wind, heat, precipitation, thunderstorms and fire weather in 19 separate regions of SCE’s service area.

A zero is a blue-sky day. A four or five means it’s time to activate an Incident Management Team to manage the event and consider prepositioning resources to respond to potential weather-related power outages.

“We talk with the meteorologists and we talk with our operations teams and we look at the areas that might be most impacted,” said Crystal Chambers, senior manager of SCE Business Resiliency. “We can't avoid every single power outage, but we can make sure that we've got the people and resources in place to respond as quickly as possible and really cut down on those outage times and on the impacts to our customers.”

Jacqueline Bennett is a former television meteorologist who in 2022 joined an SCE weather team with a wide range of skills.

Paul Roller, Weather Services senior manager, described the storm that hit SCE's service area in late February as the biggest he's seen during his 15 years with the company.
Paul Roller, Weather Services senior manager, described the storm that hit SCE's service area in late February as the biggest he's seen during his 15 years with the company.
“We have people with different specialties. We have fire meteorologists, for example, people who specialize in hydrology, numerical weather prediction, which is computer modeling, and it all sort of meshes together,” Bennett said. “It's very important to protect not just our infrastructure, but our crews and the public. Weather is becoming ever changing, and it's going to become more extreme."

Roller manages one of the largest networks of private weather stations in the nation, connected to proprietary in-house computer forecasting models that allow SCE’s weather team to provide remarkably accurate forecasts.


“We proactively prepare for storms,” Roller said. “We're going to try to do our best to keep you safe and keep your power on.”