Why Weather Prediction Is Still So Hard

The U.S. experienced 18 separate billion-dollar weather or climate disasters in 2022, costing a total of $165 billion in damages. The disasters were also deadly, causing at least 474 direct or indirect fatalities, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the U.S., NOAA is in charge of tracking weather and disseminating forecasts. It’s a complicated job that begins with collecting billions of observations per day on metrics like temperature, wind speed and moisture. This information is then fed into powerful supercomputers that produce weather models that meteorologists use to come up with forecasts. But these models are not perfect.

As climate change intensifies extreme weather events, accurate weather forecasting is becoming more important than ever. It’s why a new generation of private companies have cropped up to provide paying customers with hyperlocal, hyperspecific weather forecasting and data. The weather forecasting services industry in the U.S. was estimated to be worth about $17.4 billion in 2023, according to IBISWorld.

CNBC spoke with two such companies, Boston-based Tomorrow.io and Alameda, California-based Saildrone, to learn how their technology can help improve weather forecasting for NOAA and others.

Chapters:
00:00 — Introduction
02:13 — Weather forecasting
07:39 — Tomorrow.io
10:53 — Saildrone
13:56 — Forecasting future

Produced, Shot and Edited by: Magdalena Petrova
Animation: Jason Reginato, Christina Locopo
Supervising Producer: Shawn Baldwin
Additional Footage: Saildrone, Tomorrow.io, Getty Images, U.S. Navy, NOAA
Additional Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times

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Why It’s Still So Hard To Forecast The Weather