IPCC Warming:

• Changes in average global surface temperature from over the last 2020 years rebuilt from paleoclimate records and observations since 1850 (left)
• Change in average global surface temperature modeled with the human influence (orange), with only natural sources of variability, and from human observations (black) (right)

Climate science experts meanwhile have found that the changes to mean global climate (think increasing ocean heat content, increasing sea level, rising surface air temperature, and elevated atmospheric water vapor content) have contributed in varying degrees to weather-related disasters in recent times.

And therefore, the weather, intense weather, will inevitably continue to reflect that series of changes in the climate system. This is more than just a hypothesis because we have seen these phenomena play out on numerous occasions, over many disparate regions. It almost seems like with the turn of every new month, there is some location on Earth that is experiencing unprecedented environmental tumult.

• From reliable records dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, the year 2020 set the record for the most named tropical systems in the Atlantic Ocean basin
• Hurricane Dorian set the record for the strongest tropical cyclone in the Atlantic in 2019, whipping winds up over 180 m.p.h. During the storm’s peak intensity over Elbow Cay in the Bahamas
• An extreme deluge over Hanalei Bay on the north shore of Kauai in April of 2018 led to 49.69 inches of rain – in just 24 hours
• In 2013, researchers in El Reno, OK measured winds of 296 m.p.h. inside the widest tornado ever observed (2.6 miles) as it reached max intensity
• The hottest temperature ever reliably recorded worldwide was 130.0°F (54.4°C) on July 9, 2021 at Furnace Creek, CA, which broke the prior record of 129.9°F (54.4°C) set at the same exact location just one year prior
• In the 80-100 years before 2021, locations in near-coastal Washington and Oregon rarely reached 100°F, but in late June of 2021 Portland International and Seattle-Tacoma International airports broke all-time daily maximum temperature records with over 103°F – on three days in a row.

The list goes on and recent events point to changes in the climate system exerting significant pressure on daily weather extremes. For example, this summer’s heat in the Pacific Northwest was 30-40°F above normal. It was even hotter in western Canada, where the national temperature record was set one day at Lytton, British Columbia (49.6C, 121°F), before wildfire was ignited and burned through the town the next. The scientific consensus though (which is sustained by climate projections looking even more than a century ahead) is that such “routine” weather occurrences will continue to become more severe, more spatiotemporally extensive, and occur more often. So what are we to do?

Decarbonization is Only Part of the Solution

A primary focal point of discussions on ESG strategy and what we do about climate change is decarbonization – efforts to virtually wean ourselves off of burning fossil fuels to drive growth across the global economy. Going a step further, there has been much innovative hype surrounding the prospect of removing carbon from the atmosphere as a way of enhancing climate change mitigation efforts. But with the current state of the global supply chain and many iterations that will be required before carbon sequestration technology can work at scale, mitigation strategies will hedge on using less. Period. Indeed, much of the public and private sector vision is toward a paradigm shift to renewable energy, such as wind and solar solutions (we cannot forget that the U.S. government has also signalled that it is all for this transition). And weather intelligence will continue to be a fundamental part of that transition.

To facilitate wind-, solar-, and hydro- power assessments and the renewable energy transition, the short-term variability of parameters like low-level winds, cloudiness, and precipitation must be accurately captured and precisely quantified. Otherwise, calculating renewable power potential on-site and estimating the long-term profitability of new and existing projects would be nearly impossible. Specifically, what are the atmospheric conditions over a given mountain plateau, open field, or reach of a particular watershed? Climate models are adept at providing large-area context (like regions spanning hundreds of miles) for up to hundreds of years or longer, but they leave much to be desired in the way of details around key operational assets. The critical capability that we are alluding to is localization for multiple weather phenomena at once.

Tomorrow.io has developed a veritable arsenal of weather intelligence solutions and more: the extensive historical archive, the current conditions layer, NowCast, and the Comprehensive Bespoke Atmospheric Model system (CBAM). Both NowCast and CBAM deliver unmatched resolution and refresh rates for tracking weather over entire continents. Every single weather analysis happens in near-real-time and operational forecasts systems are initiated as quickly as every five minutes. Tomorrow.io’s proprietary software and models are able to resolve weather volatility – the rapid, impactful weather fluctuations that many other models crucially miss. With such granularity, Tomorrow.io provides confidence metrics and the most likely range of conditions for individual points in the field. Moreover, we continuously store current conditions analyses in our historical archive – which now houses many terabytes of data in the cloud – for easy recall on-demand.

All this is combined into the Tomorrow.io Platform, which provides for the synthesis of multiple weather features of interest at once. Whether it be an exceptional drought in one end of the domain and severe winds with flash flood potential in the other, the Platform intelligently recognizes the intersection of weather perils and provides actionable insights automatically. And the Tomorrow.io Platform’s event-based thresholding is customizable to suit a diverse range of enterprise-level use cases. Interests in the energy, transportation, on-demand, construction, food service, and retail sectors have used the Tomorrow.io Platform for generating greater margins, commonly through gains in process optimization and operational efficiency. And this is all in the face of weather that has manifested throughout various epochs of changing climate.

On Implementing ESG Strategy

The trouble with incorporating holistic ESG strategy in a successful business venture (say, judged by ESG standards plus the customary financial markers) is that it can necessitate an overhaul in terms of the approach to market. Still, developing an effective ESG strategy and having a plan to implement it are different than actually enacting programs that eventually scale on their own. There is also a history of far-reaching, visionary programs getting stuck – because of the lack of funding, waning stakeholder commitment, and so forth. Any number of logistical hurdles can arise and collectively they portend the inability of a given corporation to execute on ESG strategy and reap the verifiable benefits.

From the foregoing discussion, motivation to do social good and new-found corporate incentives around incorporating ESG criteria into operations are crystal clear. But the emphasis must be on ascertaining barriers to implementation accordingly. Stakeholders that are critical for mission success should be invited to the table from the get-go so that they may contribute diverse perspectives as part of an equitable and inclusive exchange of ideas. It is imperative for corporate leadership in businesses subject to climate-related exposure to maintain an open, agile, adaptive mindset as market dynamics change, occasionally as fast as the weather itself.

Weather Intelligence is the Answer to Climate Risk

Improvements in the accuracy and precision of climate predictions have engendered greater confidence in the model outcomes which are predicted for varying time horizons ahead of the present time – for the year 2030, 2050, or 2100. We have sharper depictions of what the future state of the climate will be in terms of sea level, glacial extent, temperature, and hydrology. Downstream from there, specialists typically set assumptions and subsequently model climate risk for assets spanning multiple sectors or regions. This methodology has been tried and proven for creating decision support tools before. Yet there are still sources of uncertainty, such as what emissions trajectory we ultimately follow. If there is more consumption in general, nearly all indications are that the hotter our world will become. The other glaring piece of uncertainty is what that actually entails for individual stakeholders.

Remember that weather is the expression of climate, and any company that cares about the climate will inevitably care about the weather. Maybe a touch unrealistic, but customers often expect that climate information will be specified according to their unique use cases. This sets a high bar. The SEC delivering on its initiative to further promote comprehensive climate-related financial disclosures will be only part of the solution. The remaining pieces of the climate-risk product value chain involve translating climate prognostics into localized weather impacts, which are then used to greatly refine risk and vulnerability assessments. Here is where Tomorrow.io is changing the game.

Our core specialty is weather intelligence and we’re investing millions of dollars into the Tomorrow.io platform to mitigate and adapt to climate risk. We do this by bundling proprietary machine learning and physical numerical weather modeling together at the highest possible resolution. The models we build are trained to be intensely sensitive to the inputs that they are initialized with – if the climate forcing changes in the background then our models readily adapt to that stimulus. Tomorrow.io is well-positioned to provide that final mile of impact prevention as actionable insight for multiple weather hazards.

The industry-wide movement toward adopting loftier ESG criteria targets is undeniable and the groundswell of public approval only adds to that momentum. By virtue of its cutting-edge weather intelligence technologies, Tomorrow.io is helping companies achieve these strategic objectives with greater ease, thereby uncovering long-term value propositions on the order of billions of dollars each year. However, the best part is that by focusing on sustainable governance practice, prosperity does not come at the expense of pristine environments and social values. That’s a cause worth investing in.