38 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes
THE BUSINESS OFWEATHER
One of The Weather Company’s most important businesses is its B2B services. The company supplies an array of organisations and commercial interests with up-to- the-minute weather information, forecasting and weather insights. Aviation is a key industry, and one that can be affected dramatically by sudden changes in weather. In fact, The Weather Company has meteorologists embedded with some airlines at air traffic control and operations centres globally. The company also works with airports and cargo carriers. They can offer weather data for planning around flight delays or help with rerouting, cancellations and flight tracking. This includes pilot briefs and weather data sent directly to the cockpit crew, which can include en route hazards or the warning about potential rerouting or lightning on the way. Turbulence, though rarely dangerous, can ruin a flight, so The Weather Channel has a number of turbulence solutions, which include sensors in the planes providing pressure and turbulence information, which can then be sent to the following planes to let them know about likely turbulence ahead.
The company’s weather services extend to the ground crews, with WSI Hubcast products that send alerts to ground crews and can provide alerts to the people working on the tarmac. Energy companies are also a big customer, including those companies working with long-range transmission and maintaining power lines. The energy solutions extend to traders working with the energy commodity world. The outage projection tools allow the company to make predictions about when weather might impact the power grid or create outages. These tools can help power companies be proactive in getting help in areas where it might be needed, getting customers back online faster. The company can also send weather alerts for worker safety and integrate weather data into operations for crews working in the field. One solution uses AI to look at power lines and transition poles across a company’s territory to see if rain or foliage has had an impact on the network. Storms taking down power lines is a common cause of weather-related power outages and wildfires have been sparked by foliage too close to power lines.
Insurance companies are also beneficiaries. They can access weather data analytics to protect their policy holders and cut costs by reducing claims. If companies can monitor potential damage coming from storms, they can better alert their customers before damage occurs. There is a correlation between weather conditions and consumer buying patterns. The Weather Company has fascinating data sets showing what kinds of purchases people make in different weather. When a hurricane is coming, there is apparently a rise in pop tart sales – strawberry pop tarts, specifically. This helps retailers better plan their supply chain management, product demand, pricing, inventory and staffing.
They also work on the B2B side with advertisers, using IBM’s Watson Advertising, to help connect marketing messages to the right customer with the right message based on their location and what the weather might be. If the temperature reaches a certain point, or if a type of weather has been forecast, an ad can be changed on the fly. And of course, there’s the media. Work across TV, mobile and online allows broadcasters to enrich their weather graphics and reporting using the advanced sets of weather data and broadcast production tools, including visualisations and AR tools. It would appear that anyone doing business under the sky is a potential customer for The Weather Company.
you’re talking about the role of news organisations, tech companies and social media. If you’re talking about policy, you’re talking about all the politicians, about where money’s going to be spent, about migration, about war. If news organisations begin to see how climate change affects everything else they’re already covering, I think we’ll see greater breadth and much deeper coverage. We have been surprised at how much our audience was interested in our look at climate change. I think there was some concern about whether a general audience was ready for The Weather Channel to really step up and try to be a prominent voice on this issue. If you had said to someone five years ago that The Weather Channel would win three Emmy Awards in four years for climate change-focused documentaries – about how climate change intersects with kids who work outdoors or the pollution
of a giant lake – people just wouldn’t have believed that. KEVIN HAYES: I also think my concern was that people would think it was boring. That climate change is a far off problem.
One thing I’ve learned covering climate change is that it’s not a far off problem, either temporally or geographically. And there’s no reason for it to be boring in your coverage. I think that’s on media outlets to find good meaty stories that resonate.
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