That potential was enough to convince Monsanto to come aboard as a key investor in 2016. Understory also markets its weather stations to the agricultural industry, saying its network can provide accurate weather updates for each individual field. For insurance companies, Understory claims its hyper-local wind and hail monitoring networks record individual hailstone impacts, wind gusts, and even raindrops in real-time at high resolution. The platform also provides data on wind chill, heat index, evaporation rate, and a number of other weather variables. It manufactures weather stations called RTis, short for Real Time Instruments, which monitor hail, wind, rain, temperature, pressure, and humidity at ground-level every second of every day. However, instead of software, Understory pins its weather forecasting technology on hardware. The insurance industry is also a prime target for Understory, a Madison, Wisconsin-based startup founded in 2012 that has raised $9.5 million in disclosed funding. Update : Check out our most recent article on ClimaCell titled “ ClimaCell Weather Data Comes from Cellular Networks.“ Stationed at Ground Zero Consider that a company like State Farm doled out more than $2 billion in damages caused by wind and hail in just 2014. No doubt insurance companies would like to cut down on fraudulent claims-or just make it harder to make the case-by tracking the next hail storm. For example, in the case of the insurance industry, ClimaCell says its hyperlocal forecasts can validate weather-related claims in minutes because it can actually determine the type and intensity of precipitation street by street. Credit: ClimaCellĬlimaCell is flogging its “nowcasting” software platform to a number of industries, including airlines (JetBlue is an investor), on-demand delivery services, construction and insurance companies. How ClimaCell stacks up against the competition. ClimaCell claims its approach doubles the reliability of radars, with 10X the ground resolution. This sounds a bit like the weather tech being tested by a small satellite company called GeoOptics, which uses distortions in GPS signals to map variables like temperature and humidity to create weather maps. Dubbing its hyperlocal, minute-by-minute forecasts as “nowcasting”, ClimaCell developed sophisticated software powered by Nvidia’s GPU hardware to create high-definition weather maps based on the ways weather can affect cellular signals. The solution: Extracting weather data from cellular networks and combining it with historical and traditional weather data from sensors like ground-based weather stations, radars and satellites. Accurate weather forecasting, particularly in the short term and over small spatial scales, can make or break military ops, so the trio decided they could do better than the National Weather Service and NOAA with its high-tech weather satellites. In the case of ClimaCell, which has raised $20 million in disclosed funding ( and most of that in the last year ), the company was founded by three Israeli military veterans who were somehow reunited while all pursuing graduate degrees at Harvard and MIT. It didn’t take long before we came across ClimaCell, a three-year-old startup out of Boston that has been generating the usual buzz that surrounds young companies with innovative tech and an interesting backstory. But that got us to thinking: What sort of weather forecasting technology are startups working on? How’s the Weather Where You are Now? And Now? While the local TV meteorologist is an easy scapegoat when it literally rains on your picnic, weather forecasts are getting better despite popular opinion. Last year, weather-related disasters cost the U.S. Power companies rely on forecasts to anticipate how much energy the communities they serve might need during a heat wave. It can cause floods and landslides, help yield a bumper crop or lay waste to a nation’s bread basket. But the weather is more than idle chit chat. Almost every conversation, at some point, seems to circle back to how much snow they got on the east coast or how little rain they’ve received on the west coast. Everyone likes to talk about the weather.
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