If you use weather-related data products in your business, you may already know that the industry is in need of a reset. But you probably don’t know why. That’s because most companies who provide these products have a dirty little secret.
You see, to get a clear answer to your specific problem, you first have to ask the right questions. That’s no secret. What is hidden from view is that nearly all weather companies build their products on core technology designed by the National Weather Service to answer questions unrelated to your needs.
How can this be?
In short: it’s expensive and time consuming to solve your specific problem.
In length: Asking the right questions is essential to getting the right answer. And to ask the right questions, we have to start from scratch. We must build our own technology, based on original science, starting with the most basic ingredients. That’s difficult, costly, time consuming, and risky.
It’s much easier to take existing data sets (generated to answer a different set of questions about someone else’s problem), repackage them and say “close enough.” And that’s worked for many weather companies because, in most cases, “close enough” was better than nothing. There was no alternative.