Australia boosts weather forecasting with AI technology partnership

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This online article originally appeared online on the IT Brief website, 14 May, 2024

Written by Sean Mitchell, Publisher

 

A partnership pairing Australia's most advanced climatic modelling technology with a world leader in weather forecasting marks a new era in risk mitigation and weather forecasting for the nation. Australians will now have access to a superior service that produces extraordinarily detailed and highly accurate weather predictions.

The collaboration brings Aeeris, a company behind Australia's Early Warning Network (EWN), together with Tomorrow.io, a global forerunner in advanced weather forecasting. The Early Warning Network is a widely used system that delivers early warnings and notifications to some of Australia's largest insurers and councils. The EWN is bolstered by a 24/7 monitoring team, proprietary technology, and valuable data gathered from across Australia, including a range of weather models, one being that of the Bureau of Meteorology.

At the helm of pioneering weather forecasting, Tomorrow.io uses artificial intelligence and the first commercially built weather-radar satellites to provide hyper-precise prognostications. Although these satellites are small, they have been found to offer comparable accuracy to those of NASA. Among its impressive array of clients, Tomorrow.io counts major US airlines, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the US Air Force. In a 2021 case study, US airline JetBlue discovered that it could save as much as USD $50,000 per month per hub by using Tomorrow.io to accurately predict storm commencement and cessation, thus preventing unnecessary hold-ups and cancellations.

Aeeris has recently secured rights to resell Tomorrow.io's technology in Australia and has just signed its first customer for the tech. The new offering could significantly aid Australian businesses, particularly those in regional and rural areas that lack rain gauges or radars, marking a seismic shift in weather prediction and risk mitigation.

The addition of Tomorrow.io's resilience platform and proprietary weather data to Aeeris' portfolio compounds its alerting and risk mitigation capabilities, allowing Australian businesses unprecedented precision in managing weather risks proactively. Tomorrow.io's technology harnesses AI and machine learning to analyse its proprietary data and models along with precipitation data gathered from its growing satellite radar network.

Traditional alerting capabilities are constrained by the location and range of ground-based radar stations. In contrast, Tomorrow.io's expanding satellite network can cover remote locations. For sectors like transport and logistics, whose operations could span vast distances and remote areas, these detailed forecasting capabilities are invaluable.

Aeeris delivers excellence in early environmental warnings and hazard reduction technologies to protect people and assets and mitigate risk. By collaborating with Tomorrow.io, Aeeris can augment its service with more accurate forecasting, a broader range, and actionable insights to tackle weather-related operational challenges. Aeeris is excited to offer these advanced capabilities to its customers to build resilience and drive business continuity. The signing of its first Tomorrow.io customer underscores the potential demand for these novel services.