In January, Børge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum, urged businesses to act immediately with regard to climate change upon the release of the Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report.
“For the first time in the report’s 15-year history, the top five risks to the global economy by likelihood—as ranked by 756 experts—were environmental,” reported the UK’s Director magazine. “They were, in descending order, extreme weather, failure to mitigate climate change, natural disasters, biodiversity loss and man-made environmental disasters.”
It’s more important than ever for businesses to understand and prepare for their vulnerabilities to climate change, weather anomalies, and extreme weather events. This is precisely what Weather Source helps organizations accomplish. The Weather Source mission is made possible thanks to strong partnerships such as the one shared with data warehousing specialists Snowflake. This important relationship was featured Feb. 13 by ComputerWeekly.com, and in November by Techerati.
The Weather Source dataset is complex, covering every landmass in the world and up to 200 miles offshore. Because of this, Weather Source requires a powerful data storage partner that can store and share petabytes of data. For perspective, to store a single petabyte would require more than 745 million floppy disks or 1.5 million CD-ROMs.
“Snowflake is extremely efficient and fast, and has powerful technology for data sharing,” Weather Source CEO Mark Gibbas told ComputerWeekly.com. “This allows us to store information once and share it with many different clients, cutting down on the total storage we require and avoiding the duplication of information.”
Weather Source has also been at the forefront of Snowflake’s new data sharing marketplace, the Snowflake Data Exchange (SDE), which significantly improves the speed of insight delivery for customers.
“From an end user perspective, Weather Source does all of the heavy lifting as the data we deliver to the end user is of the highest quality and has been gap-filled, error-checked, and homogenized across space and time,” Gibbas said in Techerati’s Q&A interview. “Enabling this dataset within the Snowflake platform and SDE removes the requirement for the end user to engage in data moving and the ETL (extract, transform, load) process as the data is instantly available and usable.”
With weather accounting for more than $600 billion in annual economic loss in the U.S. alone, it’s apparent that nearly every business has some degree of weather sensitivity.
“Climate change is in full effect,” according to Gibbas. “Weather information is important to many companies that have sensitivity to weather, which can impact their operations and their revenue.”
