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Extreme Weather and Wildfire

Upper-air

This report offers guidance to electric utilities on the following: leveraging upper-air profiler data to improve weather forecasts; enhancing situational awareness of high-wind events; designing, deploying, and maintaining profiler networks; and integrating upper-air profiler data into utilities’ data management systems. The report also compares data collected in this study with that from other meteorological studies of upper-air profilers used in wildfire risk areas.

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Extreme Weather Team
Implementation of Upper-Air Profiler

The Extreme Weather Team piloted a sodar, a type of upper-air profiler, to measure winds 80-600 meters above ground level.

We found that strategically located sodar could help predict the onset of surface winds several hours in advance, enabling officials to take critical mitigation measures.