Houston, TX – Follow me here: The Weather Company owns The Weather Channel (which we all watch on TV), Weather.com (the 4th most popular app out there), Weather Underground (a popular website where home weather watchers can upload their data), and WSI (the weather vendor from which most TV stations get their data/graphics supply).
In 2016, IBM closes a deal to buy The Weather Company, but not including The Weather Channel, although they will supply their data. So IBM walks away with the internet holdings and the vendor holdings. And they are really good at computers. Apps need computers. TV Weathercasters need computers.
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Tomorrow, IBM will introduce a game-changing computer: DYEUS, a name taken from the Indo-European god of Daylight and Rain.
What makes it great? POWER. Nine processing chips, also used in the world's fastest supercomputer, will supply 12 trillion pieces of weather data every day and process forecasts every hour.
But a computer has to process DATA, so where will it get that data? In addition to regular ground data and airplane sensor data, they'll also have access to smartphone data (remember that Weather.com app?) and hundreds of thousands of weatherwatcher data (remember that Weather underground network of people uploading their home weather station information?).
The DATA then has to be crunched into a forecast and DYEUS will forecast out to 15 hours for 26 million locations around the world! This is not an American or EURO competitor (yet) but it will replace the RPM, which you see me show on TV a lot. The RPM model (Rapid Precision Mesoscale) has been an excellent SHORT TERM model for years.
So will you see these results on TV? Yes, eventually. As I said earlier, WSI is our vendor for data and graphics and IBM will supply us with the DYEUS model. Time will tell if this venture is as good as IBM is promising. Here's a slide from a presentation at this year's NWA Broadcast Weather Conference:
By the way, this is a joint venture with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, federally funded, so the government fully supports this.
I say, welcome to the club! You can read and see an excellent report on DYEUS from CNBC right here.
Frank
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