Case Study: a major California utility company prevents wildfire damage with HEAVY.AI

Prevent Wildfire Damages and Improve Public Safety with Accelerated Weather Model Visualization and Comparisons

HEAVY.AI helped a major California utility company tackle slow legacy GIS workflows that took about six hours to visualize weather models, while also struggling with massive geotemporal datasets that had to be downsampled and could not easily be overlaid for comparison. The utility needed a faster way to assess wildfire risk, communicate weather impacts to public safety teams, and compare its detailed atmospheric models with national and European models.

With HEAVY.AI as its core analytics platform, the utility combined high-resolution geospatial data and in-house atmospheric model outputs to quickly process, visualize, and compare critical weather and wildfire information. HEAVY.AI cut model visualization turnaround from 6 hours to 5 minutes, enabled 100,000x more data to be used at much higher resolution, and improved confidence in forecasts; the company estimated this could help prevent hundreds of millions of dollars in future property damage annually.