Accurate weather forecasts a key commodity for energy producers amid climate shift
Record winter warmth around the globe has raised pressure on weather forecasters from utilities and financial markets that depend on models to work out the economic effect of climate change.
Abnormally high temperatures led to billions of dollars of lost revenue for energy producers, which have curtailed fuel supplies because everyone from homeowners to heavy industry did not need as much heat as usual. Europe was particularly affected, with temperatures 3.4°C above normal.
Those extreme variations are sharpening the focus on the systems meteorologists use to predict seasonal patterns.
“Our work is becoming more and more relevant,” said Alberto Troccoli, who heads the World Energy and Meteorology Council and is developing new forecasting tools with companies including Enel and the National Grid in the UK.
“Demand has always been driven by climate, but there’s even more scope now to examine how production is impacted by climate change.”
This year’s unprecedented winter heat was capped last month by the second-warmest February on record both in Europe and globally, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The EU programme uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world for its monthly and seasonal forecasts. It found that the current northern hemisphere winter is the warmest on record.
“This was a truly extreme event in its own right,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said. “Now more than ever, the role of Copernicus is becoming more important” as “these sorts of events have been made more extreme by global warming”.
WINTER FORECAST
Copernicus seasonal weather models performed pretty well heading into the winter.
Utilities and power producers checking the outlook in November would have seen there was a 70% chance of higher-than-normal temperatures in northern Europe and a 90% probability around the Mediterranean basin.
Other forecasters saw it differently, expecting that cold air from the Arctic would flow down into Europe as it usually does. AccuWeather in Pennsylvania and Maxar, a Marylandbased commercial forecaster, predicted this year’s winter would be colder than the last one, suggesting that US heating costs were likely to be elevated.
“Our models are not perfect but they give you a good indication,” said Troccoli, who runs the Copernicus energy operational service, which provides tools to analyse the role climate plays in energy supply and demand.
The seasonal weather model run by Copernicus has been refined over three decades to ensure accuracy to “a pretty good extent”, he said.
Troccoli is an Italian scientist who published “Weather & Climate Services for the Energy Industry” in 2019.
Now, he is mapping new data sets to show how monthly changes in atmospheric pressure systems affect economic activity.