This is our first in a series of blogs where we’ll highlight a weather event where our proprietary sensing technologies saw something in the weather that wasn’t seen by traditional sources. These “weather wins” are made even more sweet when they have a positive impact on our clients, which was the case in this example.
On February 5th, the National Weather Service and every major weather company (except Tomorrow.io), predicted heavy snow would hit O’Hare Airport in Chicago by the early afternoon (noon – 2pm). Tomorrow.io was the only provider that accurately predicted the storm would start later (at 3pm) – and we predicted it 25 hours ahead of time.
A half an hour before the storm, other major weather companies were showing that it was snowing over O’Hare (which it wasn’t). Relying on that incorrect information, one major airline cancelled dozens of flights at an estimated cost of over $250K.
At the same time, Tomorrow.io’s HyperCast (image at right), was showing O’Hare completely dry. Only Tomorrow.io clients had visibility into this bright spot of dry weather in the middle of this awful storm. Any time we can show a clearer picture of real-time weather or a forecast that better captures the timing of a storm, we can help our clients save money. In the case of airlines, if we can prevent them from having to cancel a flight, we can save them an estimated $13K per flight (depending on the airline and size and duration of the flight).
This is another example that illustrates why airlines should use multiple sources of weather information to make the best decisions around cancellations. In the weather business, no one is right all of the time but we were very proud of how well we tracked this tricky February snow storm in Chicago. We continue to be committed to using new technologies to find weather that is hard to pick up using only the traditional data sources used by the rest of the industry.
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