Science & Technology

Big data on weather

Why private players are competing with governments

 
By DTE Staff
Published: Wednesday 30 October 2019

A lucrative business

World Meteorological Organization (WMO) provides services worth $100 billion annually

Similarly, National Weather Service, USA, provides services worth $30 billion annually

The private weather industry made $7 billion in 2017. It is growing 10-15 per cent every year

High on information

There are 300 communication satellites that generate data through radio occultation, a remote sensing technique used for measuring the physical properties of the atmosphere

WMO has an additional 19,300 monitoring stations, of which 4,400 are high-tech

IBM, the largest weather forecasting company, has 270,000 monitoring stations. It also collects information through 0.5 billion smartphones globally

WMO which has 111 data processing and forecasting centres. shares information with 193 countries through its 15 telecom hubs

Weather forecasting computers can process over 40 million observations in a day and can compute 90 trillioncalculations per second. IBM's supercomputer can store 3,500 terabytes

Sources: The Weather Machine, National Weather Service, WMO, media reports, and the report "Impacts of Assimilating Smartphone Pressure Observations on Forecast Skill during two Case Studies in the Pacific Northwest," published in the journal of American Meteorological Society in October 2018

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