Weather Analytics with a Touch of Innovation and Expertise: Weather Decision Technologies

“Founded in 2000, Weather Decision Technologies serves organizations with higher resolution and more accurate global weather analytics at a price point amenable by all.”

Improved weather analytics and weather risk communication provides individuals, businesses and communities the capability to prepare for dangerous storms, saving lives and minimizing damage to infrastructure.WDT’s analytics also help companies leverage weather to maximize profits, minimize operational risks, and improve their own analytics to understand their and/or their customer’s operations.

Headquartered in Norman, Oklahoma, U.S Weather Decision Technologies Inc. (WDT) provides organizations with weather analytics and decision support on a global scale. The company utilizes big data solutions to develop and provide weather analytics such as hazardous weather detection and prediction, high resolution forecasts, decision analytics, content for mobile apps as well as interactive mapping.  They employ the world-renowned WeatherOps forecast team, staffed by experts who provide global asset protection and commodities trading decision support. Be it asset protection, positioning of goods and services ahead of weather or as response to weather, or simply warning the general public of impending adverse weather, WDT has a product to fit any need.

WDT’S Exclusive Product Offerings
SkyWise- WDT has created a big data cloud solution that, in total, aggregates a large amount of global data and runs superior weather analytic engines on that data to provide very accurate weather analytics to their customers. Through the SkyWise APIs, developers can easily integrate WDT’s weather analytics into their mobile app, website, analytics solution, ESRI-based GIS application, or their own mapping solution. WDT ingests and creates over 1 TByte of data each day and has an archive of 100 TBytes of historic weather data, as far back as 100 years. These large amounts of data and analytics, both archived and real-time, are ideal for data scientists that are developing analytics or data mining. Not only can the analytics or model be developed on archived data, once developed, the analytic or model can be run in real-time to provide operational solutions for planning and response.

A great example is in the agriculture sector, which is reliant heavily on ever changing weather and climate conditions that can be difficult to predict. With the help of SkyWise analytics, many precision agriculture companies are able to predict crop growth, the timing of pesticide application, amount and timing of fertilizer, and many other applications all at resolutions as low as 250 meters.

WeatherOps
WDT provides weather risk solutions for clients that require precise weather information to minimize risk to their operations and personnel and to maximize operations around weather impacts. WeatherOps utilizes the same SkyWise Analytics described above, but wraps the analytics in a SaaS solution that is provided via a highly interactive web interface, mobile apps, and a mobile-optimized interactive map called iMap. Additionally, as a premium service, WDT employs an expert forecast team that generates site and time specific hazardous weather alerts and warnings, as well as forecasts that provide weather risk communication to clients. Here are some site specific and differentiated information we provide to clients:

• Site-specific lightning strikealerts and countdown to safe conditions.
• Geo-referenced National Weather Service alerts.
• Temperature and precipitation forecasting weeks and months in advance for commodity hedges and agricultural planning.
• Tropical storm risks.
• Heavy rain site-specific alerts including Estimated Time of Arrival and Time of Departure.

Mobile Apps
With help from WDT’s Mobile Apps, one can access all the information meteorologists do in order to determine exactly what a storm is doing, what the site specific forecast is and what hazards are a risk. These advanced apps are simple to use for the novice but also offer all the tools the pros require. The customized mobile apps available on iOS and Android are:

RadarScope: Is the “go to” radar app for a large percentage of meteorologists and weather enthusiasts. Users can view NEXRAD high resolution radar data as well as severe weather warnings and lightning strikes in a highly interactive and rapidly updating map.

Weather Radio: The Weather Radio by WDT app provides users with critical alerts via voice and push notification regarding life-threatening weather events.

STRIKE: Hundreds of individuals are injured or killed every year by lightning and STRIKE is here to change that. It provides more accurate alerts than those offered by typical consumer alerting services.

Client Territory
The company targets the WeatherOps SaaS solution to logistics and large corporations, their SkyWise analytics solution is targeted to a broad audience across many verticals, essentially any organization that wants to integrate analytics or content into their internal solutions or external services. The company has specific clients for each. Highlighting some of their clients, they include Jeppesen/Boeing, Cox Communications, TransOcean, Devon Energy, Pinsight Media+, Whataburger and many more.

Future Road map
The company provides analytics and decision support products designed to save lives, streamline business operations and logistics, and increase the bottom line of their clients worldwide. Future focus areas are expansion of their verticals to include emerging markets and further implementing products and services overseas.

“For the past 15 years, WDT has evolved ahead of the industry in order to remain competitive and sustainable”

Meet the CEO
Mike Eilts is passionate about saving lives and helping companies manage operations through effective communication of weather risks to businesses and the public. He has deep expertise in weather analytics and how these analytics can be applied to business solutions. Mr. Eilts is a co-founder of Weather Decision Technologies and has been the President and CEO since the beginning, over 15 years ago. Mike received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Meteorology and an MBA from the University of Oklahoma. He is also a Harvard Senior Executive Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Before founding WDT in 2000, Mike worked at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the last 7 years as the Assistant Director. He has written over 75 publications on subjects in Severe Storms, Doppler Weather Radar, automated severe weather analytics and aviation weather.

“The weather information you need, exactly when you need it”