Leveraging weather data to your business advantage!

Abstract

Climate changes driven by environmental decline and resultant extreme weather conditions is unleashing nature’s fury like we have never witnessed before. Therefore, whether it is flash floods accompanied by massive destruction of lives and properties, or forest fires destroying 100’s of years old biodiversity, or simply the highly unpredictable weather conditions that is disrupting human lives and businesses around the world, we need to factor in these changes into the decision-making fabric of corporates now. This article examines the impact of weather, and how by using artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep analytical capabilities, we are able to enhance the accuracy of weather forecasting and help businesses to take more informed decisions about their business operations - from procurement of raw materials, to manufacturing mix, sales forecast, product positioning, and supply chain operations.  

INTRODUCTION

Environmental decline and severe weather events from climate change are impacting our daily lives and the ways we do business, forcing industry leaders to seriously review and fundamentally change the way they operate. 

Globally, companies are facing climate-related damage to their assets, disruptions to supply chains and operations, as well as increasing expectations from consumers and investors to perform as an environmentally responsible leader. 

Extreme weather, climate action failure and human-led environmental damage were cited as the top three most likely risks for businesses over the next ten years in the World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks Report 2021.” Businesses need actionable environmental insights to address these challenges. However, the current methods are often cumbersome and inaccurate, and require intensive manual labour, climate and data science skills, and computing power to provide the insights that businesses need to improve their decision-making processes.

Minimizing disruption to your business requires more than just accessing climate and weather data - you must employ advanced analytics and intelligent workflows to reimagine processes and predict how your assets, employees and customers could be impacted. 

As weather and sustainability become increasingly important business imperatives, Weather Data based analytical solutions are helping businesses to plan for and respond to disruptive events to better ensure business continuity and resiliency across global supply chains; and niche Consulting Firms are leading the way to help businesses to evolve their business strategies and deploy leading edge technologies to simplify and automate processes impacted by climate and weather.

LEVERAGING WEATHER DATA FOR ENHANCED BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Globally, companies are now leveraging weather forecast data to plan for and to respond to critical weather events with advanced analytics to ensure their business success and continuity.

Weather data and climate conditions, combined with AI, and operational data into a single solution not only helps to predict disruptions to your business, but rapidly respond to them as well. Some of the actions that can be delivered with a combination of these factors are:

• Prepare for the unexpected with business intelligence that brings together proprietary and third-party geospatial, weather, and IoT data to predict and plan for weather events. 
• Prevent disruption to critical assets, infrastructure, and operations by using geospatial data and analytics to assess the climate risk. 
• Determine security and prepare contingency plans across supply networks. 
• Empower strategic decision making with enterprise-wide visibility to KPIs across your business operations. 
• Ensure business continuity with insights developed from advanced analytics on your assets, workforce, and customers. 
• Deliver comprehensive climate risk and related carbon performance reporting with confidence.

Innovative Weather Data enabled analytical solutions are designed to help organizations to achieve the following:

• Monitor for disruptive environmental conditions such as severe weather, wildfires, flooding, air quality, and carbon emissions and send alerts when detected.
• Predict potential impacts of climate change and weather across the business using climate risk analytics. 
• Gain insights into potential operational disruptions and prioritize mitigation and response efforts. 
• Measure and report on environmental initiatives, while reducing the burden of this reporting on procurement and operations teams.

These leading-edge Weather Data enabled applications deliver environmental insights via APIs, dashboards, maps and alerts that can help companies to address both immediate operational challenges as well as longer term planning and strategic investments. 

For example, manufacturers and retailers can prepare better to deal with shipping and inventory disruptions with advanced knowledge of severe weather-related predictions, or factor environmental risks when they plan their warehouse locations; utility companies can determine where to trim vegetation around power lines; energy companies can balance supply and demand for both conventional and renewable energy, or determine risk to their critical assets from wildfires due to climate change; help supermarkets to get a clearer picture of how refrigeration systems are contributing to their overall greenhouse gas emissions, or prioritize locations for improvement; or how businesses dependent on agriculture produce can improve their sales and operations planning. 

BUILDING BLOCKS OF WEATHER DATA ENABLED ANALYTICAL SOLUTIONS 

Leading Weather Data enabled analytical solutions are a set of inter-related applications in a single integrated SaaS suite that are used to augment decision-making within enterprise processes to address sustainability, resiliency, and climate change challenges. These solution sets need to be prioritized for deployment depending upon the client’s business and a clear time-bound roadmap established to achieve their company’s business objectives. Nevertheless, it’s a journey that needs to be initiated today and necessary guardrails established to review its progress and ensure success over an agreed timeframe.

Globally, clients are using Weather Data enabled applications to drive Weather Intelligence, Carbon Accounting, Vegetation management, Outage Prediction, Regenerative Agriculture, Renewable Energy Forecasting.

• Weather API services provide access to a variety of weather data such as high-accuracy, hyper-local forecast, historical data and industry-specific data packages such as agriculture, aviation and renewable energy. 
• Geospatial analytics engines bring geospatial-temporal datasets to equip the businesses with a unique set of knowledge, imperative to maintaining the leadership in the era of machine learning and AI. 
• Historical weather data helps to grasp weather's impact on businesses and better manage future outcomes with precisely accurate historical record of weather data. This includes hourly values for a wide range of atmospheric and weather factors. 
• Lifestyle indices relate to matters such as air quality, pollen, flu outbreaks, tides, aches and pains, breathing, dry skin, frizz, static electricity, frost potential, heating and cooling, golf, leisure travel, running, skiing, and mosquito activity.
• Operations dashboard connects data insights to visual representations which users can understand and configure, no matter what background and technical skills they have. An intelligent alerts console can push out action items to all the concerned personnel, at the right time and right place so that the weather insights for your business can be taken to actions instantly.

Let’s take two diverse industry use cases to exemplify the increasing relevance of weather data to drive business insights – Fertilizer & Pesticide Manufacturing, and Power Distribution Companies.

HOW FERTILIZER AND PESTICIDE MANUFACTURING COMPANIES CAN BENEFIT FROM DEEPER AGRICULTURAL DATA INSIGHTS

Using accurate weather data can provide valuable insights and assist in various use cases within the agriculture industry. Fertilizer and pesticide manufacturing companies can benefit tremendously with enhanced knowledge of the impact of weather and environmental forces on the type, health and growth maturity curves of crops, because the accuracy of their demand planning, manufacturing and supply chains is highly dependent on these factors.

Let’s first analyze how farmers can use the weather data to improve their crop yield, risk assessment and insurance, and to introduce sustainable agriculture practices. Some examples are:

Crop Planning & Management: Weather data helps farmers make informed decisions regarding planting, harvesting, and crop rotation. By analyzing historical weather patterns, farmers can determine the best time to apply fertilizers or irrigate crops based on rainfall, temperature, and humidity data.

Pest & Disease Management: Weather conditions play a significant role in the spread of pests and diseases. By integrating weather data with pest and disease models, farmers can anticipate outbreaks and take proactive measures to prevent or control them. For example, they can time their pesticide application based on weather conditions that are favorable for pest development.

Irrigation Optimization: Water is a critical resource in agriculture, and weather data helps optimize irrigation practices. By considering current and forecasted weather conditions, farmers can adjust irrigation schedules to avoid overwatering or under-watering, thus promoting efficient water use and reducing costs.

Crop Yield Estimation: Weather patterns affect crop growth and productivity. By analyzing historical weather data alongside crop growth models, farmers can estimate yield potential accurately. This information enables better planning for applying fertilizers, harvesting, storage, transportation, and marketing of the harvested crops.

Nutrient Management: Weather data, particularly rainfall patterns, can influence the leaching and availability of nutrients in the soil. By correlating weather data with the soil nutrient analysis, farmers can make informed decisions about fertilization strategies and adjust their nutrient application rates accordingly.

Risk Assessment & Insurance: Weather data can help assess risks associated with extreme weather events such as storms, droughts, or frost. Fertilizer companies can make use of this data to plan their supply chains accordingly and avoid stocking in impacted areas. Similarly, insurance companies can use this information to develop agricultural insurance products that protect farmers against weather-related losses.

Livestock Management: Weather conditions directly impact livestock health and well-being. By analyzing weather data, farmers can plan shelter, ventilation, and feed management strategies for their livestock to ensure optimal conditions and reduce stress-related issues.

Sustainable Agriculture Practices: Weather data can support the implementation of sustainable farming practices. Farmers can use it to monitor environmental conditions and implement precision agriculture techniques, reducing the use of water, fertilizers, and pesticides while maximizing yields.

The fertilizer and pesticide manufacturing companies can also leverage similar weather data and environmental factors to gain insights about crops, and use that data to optimize their demand planning, manufacturing and supply chain operations. 

FERTILIZER INDUSTRY USE CASES

Demand Planning & Manufacturing:  Since weather patterns affect crop growth, productivity, as well as crop yield estimations, fertilizer companies can use regional hyper local weather data together with contextual analytics, to be in sync with the farmers’ decisions regarding planting, harvesting, crop rotation, and their expected timelines to apply various fertilizers and pesticides during the specific crop cycles in India – Kharif, Rabi and Zaid. This will help the fertilizer companies to manufacture, supply and stock the required fertilizers in the right time and volumes across all their serviced markets and talukas. 

Revenue Forecast: Fertilizer companies can base their demand & supply planning decisions on the three cropping seasons, the corresponding crops grown in those seasons, as well as the expected crop growth and health. They can dynamically moderate their revenue forecasts based on any sudden changes to the forecasted weather conditions such as unseasonal rains, hailstorms and cyclones, that may impact the health and yield of crops in the impacted regions, thereby influencing the buying decisions of farmers in those areas. 

Supply Chain Planning: Fertilizer companies manufacture, supply and stock various types and grades of fertilizers in their own warehouses, distributors and dealer networks. By evaluating the prevailing hyper-local weather conditions, fertilizer companies can avoid supplying stocks to the impacted regions, thereby not only saving the cost of supply chain, but also preventing potential damage to the fertilizers stocked in such impacted areas.

Agriculture Data Advisory Services: Fertilizer companies can create their own farmers and common interest group communities and leverage the weather and environmental factors data to advise their them about recommended actions to maximize their crop yield and fight pest infestation in a timely manner and use that opportunity to cross and upsell their products in a more informed and scientific manner. 

In summary, fertilizer and pesticide manufacturing companies can use accurate weather insights to not only advise the agricultural produce dependent communities to improve their yields and revenues, but also optimize their own manufacturing and supply chain operations, thereby contributing to their sustainability initiatives and targets as well. 

Let’s now examine how weather data can benefit power generation and distribution companies as well. This is true for both renewable energy companies, as well as the traditional fossil fuel companies.

HOW POWER DISTRIBUTION COMPANIES CAN BENEFIR FROM DEEPER WEATHER DATA DRIVEN INSIGHTS.

Renewable energy companies, especially solar and wind power companies are directly impacted by the prevailing weather conditions to even generate their planned power supplies and end up paying huge penalties for either under or over supply of power to the Government or large enterprise customers.  

Similarly, power distribution companies need to understand the impact of weather and environmental forces on their power distribution assets and networks since they can leverage accurate weather data to enhance their operational efficiency in several ways. Some examples are:

1. Demand Forecasting: By analyzing seasonal, monthly, weekly and day-ahead weather forecasts, together with historical weather patterns, and their impact on energy consumption in specific geographical areas, power distribution companies can better predict and forecast future electricity demand. This allows them to optimize power generation, transmission, and distribution, and procurement plans accordingly, ensuring adequate supply and avoiding wastage or shortages.
2. Grid Management: Weather data can help in monitoring and managing the power grid more effectively. By considering factors such as wind speed, temperature, humidity, and precipitation, the company can proactively identify potential risks such as storms or extreme weather events that may cause disruptions. This enables them to implement preventive measures, perform maintenance, and deploy emergency response teams in advance, minimizing downtime and improving grid reliability.
3. Load Balancing: Weather information helps in optimizing load balancing strategies. By understanding how weather conditions impact energy usage patterns, the company can adjust power distribution across different regions or times of the day. This ensures a more efficient utilization of resources, minimizes overloading, and reduces strain on the grid during peak demand periods.
4. Renewable Energy Integration: Weather data is crucial for integrating renewable energy sources like solar and wind power into the grid. By analyzing weather forecasts, the company can predict fluctuations in renewable energy generation and adjust grid operations accordingly. This allows them to manage the intermittency of renewable sources more efficiently, balance supply and demand, and ensure grid stability.
5. Outage Management: By monitoring weather conditions, power distribution companies can identify areas prone to weather-related disruptions and take preventive measures, such as tree trimming near power lines or reinforcing infrastructure in vulnerable locations. Timely awareness of potential outages helps in improving response times, reducing downtime, and enhancing customer satisfaction.
6. Insurance Claims: Weather data reports that provide an undisputed proof to back insurance claims arising out of damaged power distribution assets due to inclement weather, are easier to prove and claim, because it is fully auditable and time stamped. 
7. Regulatory Reporting: Weather data plays an important part in regulatory reporting since it provides and undisputed source of data to back power generation, transmission and distribution variances and losses. 

In summary, weather data enables power generation, transmission and distribution companies to make informed decisions to enhance reliability and improve customer service, leading to greater operational efficiencies and lower costs.

SUMMARY

Organizations are recognizing the importance of leveraging weather data to better plan their business operations including sales forecast, supply chain planning, raw material procurement and manufacturing, location of new factories and warehouses, etc. Weather data helps companies to fight climate related risks better and build resiliency in their business, and to plan ahead for any foreseeable weather-related disruptive events.