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a proliferation of low-cost sensors—has opened up the field
to a fresh crop of ambitious startups. In aggregate, they
have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors,
who think the incumbents look vulnerable to creative new
business models.
They are fighting over a big and growing pie. Recent
numbers are hard to come by, but a 2013 study from the
Wharton School estimated that overall revenues for climate
and weather companies were about $3 billion and that, in
aggregate, the industry was worth some $6 billion. A 2017
report from the National Weather Service included a pre-
diction that the sector could quintuple in size.
“Every time we turn around, a different market cracks
open,” says Glen Denny, head of enterprise solutions at
Baron Services. The 29-year-old firm in Huntsville, Ala-
bama, which manufactures $1 million Doppler radar units,
has been beefing up its custom forecasting business.
The possible applications are nearly endless. Take Nascar
races, which are halted in the event of rain. At a recent event
at Michigan International Speedway, Chevy driver Austin
Dillon skipped a pit stop and placed first when a down-
pour cut the race short. His secret weapon? A private IBM
forecast that alerted him to the likelihood of precipitation.
“We get turn-by-turn forecasts within a quarter of a mile on
the track,” says Pat Suhy, manager of the Chevrolet Nascar
Competition Group, which pays more than $100,000 a year
for its forecast subscription.
The impact grows with the size of the concern. At Xcel
Energy, a Minneapolis utility with $11.5 billion in annual
sales and a big wind-power division, saved its customers
more than $60 million in fuel costs over seven years using
private forecasts from Boulder, Colorado-based Global
Weather Corp.
Each private forecaster starts with freely available in-
formation from the National Weather Service, then most
add their own data sources, collected using cheap sensors
deployed on everything from seafaring drones to, in Xcel’s
case, its wind turbines. That data is then fed into custom al-
gorithms and weather models, often underpinned by rapid
advances in AI and machine-learning.
“It’s not only easier to collect massive amounts of data
more and more quickly and run models on that data, it’s
easy to disseminate the results quickly,” says Eric Floehr,
the 49-year-old founder and CEO of ForecastWatch in Dub-
lin, Ohio, regarded as the J.D. Power of weather prediction.
“There is just more experimentation.”
mong the many weather-related start-
ups, three stand out because of the money
they’ve raised; the innovative ways they are
gathering, evaluating and selling weather
data; and the scope of their ambitions.
The most audacious may be Saildrone, founded by Rich-
ard Jenkins, 42, in Alameda, California, in 2012. A mechani-
cal engineer and sailor, he was born in the U.K. to Austra-
lian parents and moved back and forth between an English
country home near the yachting destination of Southamp-
ton and his grandfather’s Australian farm.
A
Before he studied engineering at Imperial College Lon-
don, he spent a year on the open water, including a stint
as a crew member on a yacht owned by the Italian tycoon
Gianni Agnelli. Two years into his degree, Jenkins started
building a contraption called a land yacht, with a tubular
carbon-fiber cockpit and three race-car wheels, topped with
a 40-foot sail. In March 2009, he zipped across a dry lake
in the Mojave Desert, hitting 126.2 mph and setting a world
record for wind-powered speed.
That experience incubated the idea of creating an arma-
da of oceangoing robots with a design similar to his land
yacht. He formed Saildrone as a research project that would
produce a fleet of 23-foot-long, 15-foot-high unmanned
vessels, each equipped with up to 20 meteorological and
oceanographic sensors. At first, he says, his idea was to col-
lect data on ocean acidification, temperature and salinity
and use it for the “greater good.” His first customers were
government agencies like NOAA and NASA.
By 2017, Jenkins realized that Saildrone’s robots were
gathering a unique and powerful data set that could fac-
tor into superior weather forecasts. After all, most weather
forms over the oceans, where there are few weather stations
to notice it. Though it only has 25 robots deployed, he says
Saildrone
Founded: 2012 by CEO Richard Jenkins
Sensor data from oceangoing robots produces unique
forecasts
Number of employees: 100
Money raised: $90 million
“THE OCEAN IS DRIVING OUR
WEATHER, AND BOTH THE
CLIMATE AND THE OCEANS ARE
CHANGING RAPIDLY. WE HAVE TO
UNDERSTAND THAT.”