The business of predicting the weather

Weather forecasts, believe it or not, have come a long way. A five-day forecast today is as accurate as a three-day forecast four decades ago.

- Tim Fernholz

But the 10-day forecast? That's still a coin flip—or an opportunity if you're in the weather prediction business.

There are two ways to better predict the weather: Measure it more accurately, or describe how it works in more excruciating scientific detail.

Enter WindBorne, a start-up in Palo Alto, California. Its weather balloons fly longer than most, collecting more measurements of temperature, humidity and other indicators in the upper atmosphere to create a more precise picture.

Thanks to leaps in deep learning, the observations picked up by WindBorne's far-flung balloons can be turned into a more robust picture of the future. The combination could finally make longer-term forecasts as useful as a look at tomorrow's weather.

The recent flash floods in Texas underscore that lives are at risk from the extreme weather events that climate change has made more common. And researchers have found that shorter forecast lead times since 2009 have prevented hundreds of millions of dollars in hurricane damage—per storm.

Even beyond headline-making events, the weather next week has economic implications. Businesses of all stripes make or lose money based on the forecast: retailers with far-flung supply chains, energy companies moving fuels around the country, even baseball teams watching for a rainout.

There's a catch, though. These new deep-learning forecasts are built on data provided for free by public science agencies. In the United States, that relationship is threatened by the Trump administration's heavy cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service.

Every day, at more than 100 weather stations across the US, a weather service worker fills a latex balloon with helium and launches it to collect atmospheric measurements until it flies too high and pops.