Michigan Engineering News

Predicting a hurricane’s impact with big data

A research team prepares weather models that will predict a storm’s impact on the electrical infrastructure.

A University of Michigan research team is crunching data on the fly to predict a storm’s impact on electrical infrastructure. Their models are part of a larger project that aims to predict the probability of power outages from a wide variety of events, including less severe but more frequent incidents like thunderstorms, heat waves and blizzards. Ultimately, Guikema envisions a rolling model, updated daily, that utility companies could use to allocate resources on a day-to-day basis.

If we’re successful in developing these methods…then we can help these utilities that are getting impacted by these events, restore power faster and more efficiently.

Seth Guikema
An animation of a hurricane moving on a computer screen.
Seth Guikema prepares a power outage model.

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