Food for thought: Ask the right questions, get the right answer.

Imagine that you’re the head chef of a small-town restaurant, cooking with raw ingredients like flour, eggs, milk, sugar, salt, etc. (promise this has to do with weather products, please bear with me) Using these ingredients, you make some very different items: bread (for sandwiches), gravy (for entrees), and angel food cake (for desserts).

Suppose a customer then requests some dessert fondue, with angel food cake to dip in it. Fondue isn’t on the menu, and you don’t even have a fondue base prepared, but it’s a slow day and you could really use a sale. So, you use gravy as the base and add a generous amount of powdered cocoa, milk, and sugar to improve the flavor. Upon tasting it, the customer knows it isn’t good fondue, but doesn’t complain. In fact, the customer ends up ordering it again the next time they visit. After all, it’s a small town and there aren’t any good fondue alternatives. What choice do they have?

So you add it to the menu. Is it good fondue? No. Deep down, the customer knows it and you know it. But you also know that you can sell it for a profit, and no one’s complaining… so what’s the problem, right? (at least until a better alternative comes along)

This is what’s happening in the world of weather data. 

Thanks to the National Weather Service (NWS), there’s a wealth of forecasting data freely available to anyone willing to look it up online. That’s all well and good, as this information is vital to public safety and should be freely available to the taxpayers that funded it. The problem is: Rather than starting from scratch and using proper ingredients (asking the right questions), Legacy Weather Companies (LWCs) are reformatting existing weather data products originally designed to improve public safety, repackaging the result and framing it as new information. LWCs who do this promise new insights and massive ROI, but when you brush aside the fog of sales and marketing, everything they’re selling is already available from the NWS, usually for free. What’s more, it’s all based on data sets that were designed to answer someone else’s questions that have little or nothing to do with your business. 

To get a clear answer, we must first ask the right questions. That means doing more than dressing up freely available public safety products and passing them off as groundbreaking technology with revolutionary insights. We must start with the application (the problem) and build everything from the ground up with a laser focus on finding the best solution (the answer). We must take the time to do real research, develop new data sets, and engineer technologies based on pioneering science that actually do what they’re supposed to: Answer your question.

Does it take longer? Yes.

Is it more difficult? Very much so. 

Does it actually work?

Yes. How could it not?