PC: Ironity

To preserve lives as well as infrastructure, businesses, and local economies, planning is more important than ever as the severity, intensity, and frequency of climate disasters rise. One technologically advanced forecasting firm is now stepping up, delivering incredibly specific weather forecasts and pre-storm strategy plans down to the level of a city block.

Boston-based United Airlines, Uber, Delta, Ford, JetBlue, Meta, Raytheon, and the U.S. Air Force are just a few of the companies who use Tomorrow.io. Predictions of rain, snow, fire hazard, and air quality are all included in the firm’s capabilities.

New Jersey was horribly unprepared when storm Ida’s remnants hit the state almost a year ago. The planning was limited because the hurricane had passed, but the rainfall was enormous.

According to Caleb Stratton, chief resilience officer for the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, “it rained four inches in one hour during Ida, and we had a total of six and a half inches of rain, in one storm event, which is really exceptional.”

Only two square miles in size, Hoboken sits directly over the Hudson River from Manhattan and is home to more than 62,000 people. The city had been constructing protection in the shape of parks that serve as enormous drains because it is more prone to flooding.

One of the parks is built on a huge, remotely controlled cistern that can store 200,000 gallons of water and release it as needed.

But local officials must be aware of impending events in order to maximise the system. So they started working with Tomorrow.io shortly after Ida.

“They can do really block by block forecasts and offer insights on when a storm event will occur, at what strength, for how long,” said Stratton.

Before beginning to forecast, the company works closely with its clients to explain in detail how the weather will impact everything from operations to supply chains to manpower.

According to chief marketing officer Dan Slagen, “We will take an airline’s operating protocol, explicitly upload it into our system, and then we have our own proprietary insights dashboard that informs them exactly when it’s going to happen.” We will thus inform an airline during the course of the week that these flights are going to be weather-dependent and that now is the time to de-ice your aircraft in order to avoid delays or any safety implications.

Next, the company will launch its own satellites, which will communicate with Earth far more regularly than government weather satellites.