Meteorologist

About the position

The Meteorologist position at Xcel Energy involves formulating and communicating weather forecasts to support the company's Commercial Operations and energy trading activities. The role requires generating nationwide daily and weekly weather forecasts, as well as electric load and renewable energy production forecasts for system planning and trading purposes. The Meteorologist will also communicate significant weather events that may impact the reliability of the electric and gas systems, and assist with Senior Meteorologist functions when needed.

Responsibilities

• Gather and interpret various meteorological data to formulate short and medium-range nationwide forecasts by 6:00 AM.
• Forecast load and renewable energy production required for submittal to RTO/ISO Energy Markets and for grid reliability planning.
• Provide meteorological insight and forecasting support to Power Operations and Energy Trading.
• Identify and alert Power Operations to meteorological events capable of jeopardizing system reliability.
• Communicate significant weather events that may have an impact on traded gas and power markets.
• Provide mid-day model run updates and associated commentary for trade desk, including model change assessment for the next trading days.
• Provide commentary on long range weather models and weather updates on weekends when assigned.
• Serve as a weather data source for Commercial Operations, utilizing a weather database and other data extraction techniques.
• Maintain and enhance existing forecast tools and scripts utilizing programming knowledge.
• Evaluate potential inefficiencies in current procedures and seek programmatic improvements.
• Support Wholesale Commodity Trading activity by effectively communicating forecasts.
• Develop a proprietary view of long range weather for North America.
• Evaluate various vendor forecasts and provide forecast recommendations to support weather hedging activities.
• Coordinate with Senior Meteorologist(s) during inclement weather events to provide briefing support for various operations.
• Provide fire weather outlooks and extreme weather alerts enterprise-wide.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science in Meteorology required; Master's degree preferred.
• Minimum of 2 years experience forecasting weather required.
• Familiarity with numerical weather prediction models and statistical analysis of data and gridded atmospheric data sets required.
• Strong Excel and communication skills are required.
• Experience with programming languages such as VBA, Python, R, SQL preferred.
• Familiarity with weather-related file formats such as grib, shp, netCDF, JSON desired.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with advanced statistical analysis techniques.
• Knowledge of energy market dynamics and trading strategies.

Benefits

• Health savings account
• Paid holidays
• Disability insurance
• Dependent care reimbursement
• Health insurance
• Dental insurance
• 401(k)
• Flexible spending account
• Tuition reimbursement
• Paid time off
• Parental leave
• Employee assistance program
• Vision insurance
• Gym membership
• Life insurance