PCLM-D-24-00183

Spatiotemporal patterns of power outages co-occurring with individual and multiple simultaneous severe weather events in the United States, 2018-2020

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Do,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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Kind regards,

Tarik Benmarhnia, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to Plos Climate. Your manuscript has been peer-reviewed, and comments from two expert reviewers are provided below. While the reviewers acknowledged that this is an important topic, and that the analyses are well conducted, they also raised major concerns that would need to be addressed in a revised submission. Particularly, it will be important to clarify the innovation of this specific paper, discuss the implications of not considering recovering process when using low thresholds as well as the potential geographical heterogeneities. We are looking forward to receiving a revised version of your manuscript.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This paper discusses about the nationwide geographic and temporal patterns of power outages co-occurring with individual and simultaneous severe weather events. Considering various weather events and covering the entire nation provides a comprehensive view. However, the specific choice of analysis metrics (i.e., 8+ hour outages, 0.1% threshold) makes the conclusions not generalizable. Given low thresholds (0.1%) for magnitude and duration (8+ hour outages), the authors had to carefully state “co-occurring” as at this level the system may have been affect by other operational events. As a result, the anomalous precipitation was the most common severe weather event to co-occur with this level of outages, as they are most frequent and cover all regions. But from a utility perspective, the level may not be very severe. Also, large events can cause long-lasting outage with long recovering process. Using low thresholds, the analysis do not consider the recovering process; again, large and small events are considered to have similar impact. Further analysis for different thresholds are encouraged and motivations for various threshold (e.g., for extremes that cause significant physical damage or for small events that cause disruptions) needs to be discussed. In addition, although spatial variation is discussed, the main results are based on national average. Again, due to the low threshold, weather events that occur often and everywhere would stand out in these averages although their impacts maybe relatively small. So more discussions on these differences are needed.

L66 and later, change “cyclones” to “tropical cyclones” that you analyzed based on the tropical cyclone dataset.

L70, “county-days” is a specific word that need to be explain in abstract.

L120, remove repetitive “outages”.

L121-124, not sure what the 9x, 30x, 4.7x, 0.9x mean. Please explain at least the first one.

L152, definition of “county-days” is very confusing. Check also 166, 168-L169, 170, L176-177

L160, “below 0 and the 15th percentile”, which one? Similarly for L162. And how are these threshold determined? Why was an average temperature of over 24 degrees chosen instead of 25 degrees, or why wasn’t the daily maximum temperature used?

L166, but the outage can last longer than the passage of the storms. How do you count for that?

L182, L189, L193, not sure if two several weather events case belongs to “individual hazard analysis” or “second analysis” “multiple simultaneous case”

L212, equation needs two sides. As it is simple and all words, you may just need to describe it without an equation.

L233, L234, “with” may be change to “have”.

L255, percentage over all counties? Not clear as there is “the Northeast and West Coast”.

L256, given percentage for “snowfall-outages”.

L278, the proportion among various hazards, right? The uptrend doesn’t mean there are more such events, but just they are higher portion relative to other events, right? Need explanation.

L323, L328. Tropical cyclones often induce heavy rainfalls. Do you count tropical cyclones and their induced rainfall as two hazards?

L360, Tabel 2, needs more discussion on the multiple hazards cases and results. Although the authors carefully mention “co-occurring”, it is still needed to discuss motivations on the combinations of hazards. E.g., What do they mean, physically and statistically? Is precipitation-wildfire compounding a significant case to discuss. Are there examples of snowfall-wildfire compounding? Why heat-cyclone-wildfire is nearly aero?

L390, please check the data than just speculate.

Related, the authors have only used data from 2018-2020, which may have led to missing some significant extreme events that could alter their conclusions. For example, this dataset excludes the Hurricane Ida outage event in 2021, where outages co-occurred with both heatwaves and tropical cyclones. The authors are encouraged to discuss the limitations of their results due to the restricted time frame of the data used.

The cited reference [27] for the wildfire datasets appears to only provide yearly total fire data. Did the authors rely solely on this data? If not, could the authors provide the actual data source they used? Additionally, many wildfire datasets typically only include burned area and starting date. Did the authors use a higher-resolution, dynamic wildfire dataset? If not, how did they define overlap on a county-day level?

In literature review, the authors mentioned neither of these studies examined the spatial distribution of power outages co-occurring with 2+ extreme events. However, there are several compound hazard and outage research missing in this manuscript. The authors are highly encouraged to discuss them.

Matthews, T., Wilby, R. L., & Murphy, C. (2019). An emerging tropical cyclone–deadly heat compound hazard. Nature Climate Change, 9(8), 602-606.

Xu, L., Feng, K., Lin, N., Perera, A. T. D., Poor, H. V., Xie, L., ... & O’Malley, M. (2024). Resilience of renewable power systems under climate risks. Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering, 1(1), 53-66.

Moftakhari, H., & AghaKouchak, A. (2019). Increasing exposure of energy infrastructure to compound hazards: cascading wildfires and extreme rainfall. Environmental Research Letters, 14(10), 104018.

Reviewer #2: This study uses county-level power outage data to characterize spatiotemporal pattern of 8+ hour outages co-occurring with weather events. The study reached the research aim, and the method and result are basically clear. The only concern is that the study is in an absence of novelty.

Specific comments:

1. Line 144-145: the criteria for counties with reliable data is difficult to understand, please clarify.

2. Line 150: how did the authors calculate the proportion of customers without power? The authors didn’t specify how they get access to total number of customers served. It seems that this study is a follow-up of a previous research, but necessary information should be incorporated as well to avoid confusing the readers.

3. Section “Individual severe weather events”: The authors defined severe weather events such as anomalous cold and anomalous heat. Are those definitions from certain practices or literatures? If so, please cite. If not, will changes of certain thresholds (e.g. change to 75th percentile of historical county weekly average) cause changes in the results? Please discuss.

4. Line 264-266: The sentence “The individual severe weather events were not necessarily isolated …” is confusing. If an individual weather event co-occurred with another weather event, shouldn’t this be counted as multiple weather events? Please clarify. Add an example to explain if necessary.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Spatiotemporal patterns of individual and multiple simultaneous severe weather events co-occurring with power outages in the United States, 2018-2020

PCLM-D-24-00183R1

Dear Ms. Do,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Spatiotemporal patterns of individual and multiple simultaneous severe weather events co-occurring with power outages in the United States, 2018-2020' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Tarik Benmarhnia, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Thank you for submitting a revised version of the manuscript that addressed all of the comments.

All comments were carefully addressed. Therefore, we are pleased to accept this manuscript for publication.

Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No

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