“We are a ‘software as a service’ company established to meet the need for faster, more accurate weather forecasts”: TempoQuest

The Silicon Review

“Our development team has already developed the GPU-based high-performance radiative transfer model for the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI).”

Today, the company is in the process of developing a unique platform, which will deliver next-generation weather forecasts to meteorologists of commercial users and government agencies around the world.

The company’s suite of weather forecasting software solutions are being designed to run on graphic processor unit accelerators (GPUs) instead of CPUs. This will dramatically accelerate the speed and improve the accuracy of analysis.

Though GPU accelerators are currently in use for other ‘big data’ applications, the technology has not yet been applied to comprehensive weather data analysis.

NVIDIA Corporation has committed to providing TempoQuest with support and assistance, including, technical support on application engineering, hardware and software integration as well as marketing, sales and distribution assistance for the TQI’s GPU forecasting product.

As currently practiced, satellite sensors, drones, radar, etc., will continue to collect global weather data.

TempoQuest will then process this data and provide it to meteorologists of today’s major specialist weather companies, such as The Weather Company, AccuWeather, and others. For several of their high-value end users, like commodity traders, insurance firms, airlines, transportation, power utilities, major agricultural companies, etc., speed and accuracy are critical to the success of their businesses and an extremely valuable asset.

The expenses for this business are relatively modest as the main cost is continued development and maintenance of the software platform. Therefore, the business has inherently high operating leverage and each incremental user is highly profitable.

More in depth about the company

Core focus: TQI focuses on three critical needs: Speed, Precision and Accuracy. Its foundation product platform includes weather related software for::

Forecasting: High performance weather forecasting software, AceCAST™, with an order of magnitude improvement in forecast generation speed and large increases in precision and terrain-influenced accuracy. Beta Testing to begin in 6 months.
Data Assimilation: Accelerator software DATACASTTMto alleviate the current limitations on the amount of available data that can be used in the forecast process, preventing attainable accuracy improvements. This product will follow AceCAST™.
Visualization: A new level of sophisticated graphic and analytical displays, StormCAST™, will speed up insight from terabytes of weather data, leading to better, faster forecast decisions, vital to saving lives and enhancing the economy currently being marketed.

Company’s Total Available market:

The initial relevant market, weather forecasting, is estimated by Wharton School of Business to be $8B annually, $5B in the U.S. alone. TQI’s immediate targets are the thousands of meteorologists and firms serving weather sensitive verticals.

It is estimated that 30% of the US GDP is affected by weather and climate, $5.7T annually. Conservatively, 20% of losses are preventable with modest improvements in forecasts and business solutions. Weather information is of growing importance commercially and data for weather forecasts is expanding rapidly, with data from new weather satellites, UAVs, billions of IoT devices and connected vehicles.

Present scenario

Financial Sponsorship: TQT closed an “A Round” financing with key investors-Directors, including:

A successful software exec & technology investor, Mr. Harvey Jones
A leading Silicon Valley venture capital executive, Mr. Bob Pavey
A Former CEO of Nynex Mobile, Mr. Al Boschulte
Insiders, led by Chairman/ CEO Mr. Ed Keible, - executive and investor.

Initial Forecast Product: TQI finished coding its first weather forecast software product, AceCAST™ 1.0, designed to offer 30% faster processing speed of the WRF Weather Research and Forecasting Model - the most widely used numerical weather prediction system in the world; the product will go into beta testing in Q2 2017.

Roadmap: Delivery in 2017 and 2018 of a series of AceCAST™ software products, leading to AceCAST™ 4.0, providing10X speed improvement in weather forecasting.

Technical Team: Team expanded since the A financing, adding: 1) CTO Don Berchoff, former Director, Science & Technology, National Weather Service; 2) a leading meteorology modeling expert; 3) a proven weather data scientist and visualization expert; 4) an experienced meteorological forecaster; 5) experienced CUDA Software Engineer.

Entry into Visualization Market: TQI has entered the weather visualization software market, with acquisition of the advanced WSV3 weather display software products, including the NEXRAD Pro System, radar display software.

TempoQuest Technology

TempoQuest technology is first a software code that utilizes NVIDIA Corporation’s CUDA code (Computer Unified Device Architecture), combined with FORTRAN, Open ACC and C++. The utilization of CUDA enables the TQI software application to run on NVIDIA’s HPC, High Performance Computing with Tesla accelerators.

TQI’s AceCAST™ software product incorporates the world’s most widely used regional weather forecasting model called WRF, Weather Research and Forecasting, which is supported by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR.

The AceCAST™ software product will generate the fastest and most accurate regional forecast possible.

Meet the maestros

Gene Pache, President and Chief

Operating Officer: Pache is the founding President and COO. He has 20 years of corporate executive and general management experience in multiple industries including defense, aerospace, national security space and earth observation. He has 17 years of entrepreneurial experience having started and operated several companies in industries including satellite meteorology, earth observation, and weather forecasting.