This article was originally posted on Construction Dive in April 2023.
Picture this: It’s a sunny, clear day when you and your crews arrive to a job site. You begin on schedule after the morning safety briefing, without any weather alerts or warnings. Then, two hours later, a powerful thunderstorm strikes without warning, halting progress and putting your workers in danger.
Sound familiar?
Weather-related risks pose a significant threat to the construction industry. Everyday conditions, such as heavy rain, high winds, and lightning, can delay projects, increase costs, and, most importantly, threaten worker safety. According to OSHA, slips, trips, and falls are the leading cause of fatalities in the construction industry—all of which often occur due to unexpected weather impact. And with climate change exacerbating volatile weather, these threats are only expected to grow.
Understanding Weather Risks in Construction
Weather events pose diverse and often project-specific hazards in construction. However, some weather conditions are particularly dangerous and present a significant risk to workers and assets on-site regardless of the project:
- Lightning strikes: Workers are at significant risk of being struck by lightning during thunderstorms, particularly those who work at heights or use metal equipment.
- High winds: High winds can cause workers to lose their balance and fall from heights, or cause debris to fly around and damage equipment or structures.
- Heavy rain and flooding: Heavy rain can create slippery surfaces, leading to falls or accidents with heavy equipment. Flooding can cause equipment damage and pose an electrocution risk from live wires or submerged electrical equipment.
- Extreme temperatures: Extreme temperatures (hot or cold) can threaten workers’ health and safety by reducing productivity, causing heat exhaustion/heat stroke, or increasing the risk of frostbite/hypothermia.
Why Traditional Forecasts Aren’t Enough
Despite the high risk of weather hazards in construction, most organizations still rely on traditional methods (e.g., local weather reports, consumer weather apps, National Weather Service forecasts) to react to the daily changes in weather. But these methods only provide broad, raw predictions that aren’t specific to the unique site location or decision-making needs. In fact, it’s often up to the crews themselves to interpret the forecast manually, without any means of measuring its impact on the business.
“The way that it works now is you get to the job site in the morning, and you look up at the sky and see what it’s doing and see how it’s gonna affect your day,” said Nick Gendron, Sr. Director of Pacific Northwest Office, PMA Consultants.
Disconnects between approved protocols, actual weather conditions, and communication across the team exacerbate these challenges. The result is a manual, fragmented, and error-prone process that leaves safety up to chance.
Harnessing the Power of Weather AI
Thankfully, the technology the industry needs to adapt to weather and climate impact at scale already exists.
Meet Tomorrow.io’s AI-backed weather intelligence — technology that turns the traditional weather forecast into hyperlocal, actionable insights from one single source of truth. Available via Weather API and SaaS platform, the technology offers historical, real-time, and forecasted hyperlocal data that unites all construction departments, providing minute-by-minute forecasts down to the project site level up to 14 days in advance for any location in the world.
At the heart of Tomorrow.io’s Weather AI is Gale, the world’s first weather and climate-generative AI. Backed by cutting-edge AI and machine learning, Gale synthesizes millions of data points from Tomorrow.io’s renowned weather and climate insights into simple language, offering digestible construction-specific insights.
Construction firms can plug in their unique protocols to trigger customized alerts for each weather scenario, providing all corners of the organization with the information they need to make the most informed decisions possible.
The same hazardous conditions that most often threaten crews can be adapted to at scale using weather intelligence:
- High-Wind Monitoring: Monitor wind speed continuously and receive alerts when it exceeds safe levels, allowing you to stop crane operations and protect workers and equipment.
- Early Disaster Warnings: Plan for upcoming events like heavy rain and flooding and take proactive measures, such as securing equipment and materials, to reduce the impact of severe weather on safety and efficiency.
- Lightning Alerts: Track lightning strikes within an established radius and alert crews via SMS so they can take immediate action until risk has passed.
And this is just the beginning. Tomorrow.io is set to provide even more game-changing weather intelligence to the construction industry with the upcoming launch of a first-of-its-kind commercial satellite constellation that will revolutionize global weather radar coverage.
To learn more about how weather intelligence can transform your construction operations, click here.
