ALBANY — Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a new collaboration with the University at Albany Thursday to create a state-of-the-art center to better track extreme weather events and share data in order to make weather-related emergency decisions.
The state Weather Risk Communication Center is located at the university’s Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex (ETEC) in Albany. It will use forecasts provided by the National Weather Service and data provided by the New York State Mesonet — a weather network consisting of 126 weather stations, with at least 1 in all 62 counties in the state — to prepare the state’s response to extreme weather events.
“One of the things our center is going to do is not just take the weather side of things, but also take the infrastructure side of things. We want to focus more on impacts, not necessarily the weather,” said state Weather Risk Communication Center Director Nick Bassill. “An example of that is we can do things like take the sewer capacity from cities and know that is, say, 1.75 inches per hour and then combine that with weather data so we can more specifically say we’re likely to experience flooding, because we’re seeing more than 1.75 inches per hour.”
The center at the ETEC building features an ExTREME Collaboration, Innovation, & Technology (xCITE) laboratory, with large touch screens showing the state’s Mesonet, while also including resources and student interns from University at Albany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity. The $1.5 million in annual funding was included in this year’s state budget. Hochul said climate change has increased the need for more informed, time-critical decisions.
“New Yorkers know all too well that climate change has caused more frequent, intense, and unpredictable storms across our state, and we need innovative ideas to help us respond,” Hochul said in a statement. “As we face the rising risk of extreme weather events, I’m proud to establish New York’s Weather Risk Communication Center to strengthen our preparedness and keep New Yorkers informed and safe before, during, and after emergencies.”
Bassill said, while people have gotten used to having weather apps at their fingertips through their phones, in order to better predict complex weather movement and tailor responses requires people who can analyze complex weather data.
“Everyone’s an amateur meteorologist. They wake up and they say, ‘What’s the temperature outside?’ when we decide what clothes I’m going to wear today. That’s the mundane thing and we’re gonna leave that to our friends on TV and at the National Weather Service,” he said. “But for those really big situations, you know, when there is a really critical event, say a hurricane making landfall, Buffalo Blizzard, flooding in New York City, like those kinds of situations that are really damaging to life and property. The state really needs as much information as they can to better prepare themselves for those and then respond to them after they happen.
“One of the issues that states like New York and others often have is that we have a lack of meteorologists in the state government and, when you don’t have that expertise in-house, it can be really challenging to interpret complex weather data,”
The center will create about 10 jobs and is now actively hiring meteorologists and emergency management employees. The first half of the staff will be hired during the next six months and the remaining staff will be recruited later in the year. Bassill said the center is essentially broken up into two sides.
“There’s the operational side, so those are the conventional meteorologists — the people who are just working day after day with the state,” he said. “And then, the other half is the specialty side, so people who are maybe a web programmer, who can help develop new tools for us, [and] communications experts — social scientists, who can tell us the best strategies for how do you actually communicate information? What are the best words to use when you’re trying to convey a certain situation that us meteorologists don’t necessarily always have.”
Bassill said the collaboration with University at Albany will allow potential students and interns to learn skills that can translate into a future job or graduate school.
“We can be a pipeline of sorts for those students into their next career,” he said. “Having meteorologists that grew up here, went to school here, have been used to looking at weather maps in New York and understanding how that impacts New Yorkers. If they come and they work for us, they’re coming in ready with a wealth of experience and they can just jump right in and assist the state.”