Sports Leagues and Airlines Want More Sophisticated Weather Data
(Bloomberg) — Serena Williams walked onto the tennis court in New York to thwack practice shots on a Wednesday morning in August a week before her final appearance at the US Open. Up above, in a box office at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, the tournament’s head honchos ignored the superstar. They were transfixed by 17 monitors in the room, which showed local weather patterns, heat levels, and live camera feeds around the stadium. All those data points were designed to answer one question: Should they close the roof?
The stadium’s retractable dome, a $150 million engineering marvel, is the difference between a nationally televised sporting success and a disaster. The United States Tennis Association installed it in 2016, after a men’s final got nixed in heavy rain, and added a dome to the tournament’s second stadium two years later. Still, the elements have outmatched the architecture. Last fall, Hurricane Ida struck the East Coast, bringing historic and unexpected rainfall and winds to New York. The USTA closed the roof and postponed matches but didn’t cancel the event or turn fans away. As the storm worsened, thousands of spectators were stranded in floods, and the organizers were blamed.
A year later, reminders of that mishap were plastered around the stadium’s forecasting command center. Workers had photoshopped movie posters to represent their battle with Mother Nature and hung them on the walls. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dome. Dew Point Wars. Singin’ in the Rain, with the names of Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds swapped out for those of USTA staff members. Employees had nicknamed the room “NASA Control.” But the USTA was aware it lacked NASA’s scientific pedigree. “This is not Google here,” Mike Rodriguez, director of security, said as the stadium readied for the tournament. “We could have people that can’t even get the TV on.” With a week to go before the stadiums opened, the USTA called in its forecasting specialist, Tomorrow.io, a startup in Boston that’s worked with the organization since 2018.
As the weather gets more unpredictable and deadly, sports leagues, airlines, utilities, and even militaries are turning to private forecasters such as Tomorrow.io for data that was once provided exclusively by governments, as well as for detailed advice on how to deal with the climate. Formed in 2016, Tomorrow.io has raised $260 million and signed deals with Delta Air Lines, Ford, the NFL, and the US Air Force. Next year, the company plans to launch 30 satellites equipped with meteorological radar that can monitor ocean activity many weather stations aren’t able to decipher until it hits the coast. “We want to be the biggest company in the world in weather and climate,” says Chief Executive Officer Shimon Elkabetz.
Elkabetz met his co-founders in the Israeli air force. There they discovered the paucity of good weather reporting even with the benefit of military intelligence. Rei Goffer, a Tomorrow.io co-founder and its chief strategy officer, recalls piloting an F-16 with a “super generic” one-page report listing winds and cloud patterns, without any specifics for his route or aircraft. “It’s a little more technical than what you’d see on TV,” he says. “That’s the state of the art in weather.” The veterans formed their company to tailor forecasts for specific industries that depend on predictable weather, such as airlines and sports leagues. Tomorrow.io aggregates existing data—from weather stations and sensors slapped on buoys and balloons—and mixes in other signals it collects from cell towers and car windshield wipers, an approach the company calls the “weather of things.” Its software then spits out a recommendation: Close the dome at 4 p.m. The service might tell cargo companies to avoid driving empty trucks during high winds or tell Uber Technologies Inc., another customer, to hold drivers back when wildfire smoke is blanketing the streets. Tomorrow.io declined to share its pricing or sales, but Elkabetz says his company has “a good path to profitability” within two years.
Private companies can make sharper forecasting models and better predictions than the public sector, says Kerry Emanuel, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he worries about privatization replacing the system national governments have in place for readily sharing weather data, particularly during emergencies. “All of a sudden,” Emanuel says, “you’ll have lots of little companies with lots of little datasets that are almost useless by themselves.”
Elkabetz points to his company’s work upgrading technology for the US government’s weather models and the online portal where it provides the basic parts of its forecasting software for free. But he dismisses the idea that the public sector should monopolize forecasting. “Imagine you had to rely for Covid-19 vaccines on a government agency,” he says. “We’d still be locked at home, probably.”
One shortcoming the company sees in public forecasting is over the sea. Existing weather stations struggle to read inclement events forming over the ocean. Tomorrow.io’s solution is to send its own satellites into orbit, fitted with meteorological radar. Several satellite startups already sell aerial footage to hedge funds and insurance companies; some have branched out into weather data. But Elkabetz argues that these competitors are fumbling for a business to fund their technical dreams. “Usually, space companies are a solution looking for a problem,” he says. He believes his company already has a problem to solve, and customers willing to pay for it. In 2021, Tomorrow.io was awarded a $19.3 million contract with the US Air Force to build weather satellites.
Tim Farrar, a space industry consultant at TMF Associates, agrees that satellite operators have struggled to find commercial success from the insights their spacecraft collect. But he says companies moving in the opposite direction—adding spacecraft to software businesses—often misjudge the difficulties of space. “It tends to take longer and cost more than they had expected,” Farrar says. Goffer cites precipitation-measuring satellites that NASA launched over a decade at a cost of almost $1 billion; he says Tomorrow.io’s efforts will cost 1% of that amount.
Ideally, these satellites can help anticipate freak events like the hurricane that shocked the US Open last year. Tomorrow.io says its tech saw the storm coming but didn’t anticipate how extreme and volatile it would be. “No one had a forecast that would indicate that type of flooding,” says Daniel Zausner, chief operating officer of the USTA’s National Tennis Center in New York. After waterlogged streets and subways left fans stranded last year, Tomorrow.io says it added a feature to alert customers about the potential impact on transportation.
Wayne McKewen, a US Open referee, spent the days before this year’s tournament studying the Tomorrow.io dashboards on his monitors for upswings in humidity or wind, signs of another big storm. Prior to working in Queens, McKewen refereed for 16 years in Melbourne, where severe heat, or more recently wildfire ash — conditions occurring more frequently around the world—can make tennis unplayable. Compared with Australia’s national forecasts, McKewen finds the Tomorrow.io information more reliable. But he admits to sometimes missing alerts in his email inbox because he confuses the company’s name with predictions about the next day. He’s usually trying to answer a more immediate question: “Is there rain in the next four hours?”
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