No longer seen at I-10 and Sawyer
CenterPoint Energy plans to install a network of 100 weather stations across its 12-county service territory in the Greater Houston area before hurricane season kicks off on June 1, the company announced Monday.
The weather stations are expected to help the Houston-area electric utility better forecast severe weather and more precisely distribute resources, among other improvements, according to CenterPoint’s statement.
CenterPoint said it would be the first investor-owned utility in Texas to establish its own weather station network.
“Our weather network will provide invaluable situational awareness, in real-time, to help us act quickly, proactively and precisely before weather threatens to impact the electrical system and our customers,” Matt Lanza, CenterPoint’s meteorology manager, said in the statement.
The weather stations work by taking measurements on metrics such as humidity levels, wind speed, temperature and rainfall every two to five minutes, according to CenterPoint’s announcement.
CenterPoint’s plan to build its own weather network is part of its continued efforts to prepare for the 2025 hurricane season, so that the utility improves upon its widely-criticized response to last year’s Hurricane Beryl.
In fact, a third-party review of CenterPoint’s response to Beryl found that the utility’s damage prediction model at the time was “largely ineffective” in preparing the company for the Category 1 hurricane, because the model relied on limited weather data.
CenterPoint’s effort also comes as the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has targeted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with funding and staffing cuts — an issue Lanza has written about in his much-followed hurricane blog, “The Eyewall.”
DOGE cuts to the National Weather Service have forced the weather forecasting agency to scale back its weather balloon data collection. Eric Berger, Lanza’s co-author of “The Eyewall” blog, previously told the Houston Chronicle that local meteorologists would “essentially be forecasting with one hand tied behind our backs” without weather balloon data.
Starting in June, CenterPoint’s new weather network could help fill some of the gaps. The utility plans to share the data gathered by its weather stations with state and local governments as well as with the public, “so that everyone across our communities can be better prepared,” according to Monday’s announcement.
I wish them well with this, because we need all of the accurate weather data we can get so that we can be reasonably prepared for another busy hurricane season and whatever oddball out-of-nowhere smaller-but-still-nasty storms there are to come. The disastrous federal cuts will surely make this effort less successful than it should be, but maybe it will be good enough. And if it’s not, or if CenterPoint raises its rates in a year to help them pay for this new infrastructure, you can at least sleep well knowing that the money that was saved by those NOAA layoffs went to pay for Elon Musk’s tax cuts. And isn’t that what we all voted for last year?