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WDT uses its analytics engines, weather models and a decision engine to provide customized alerts, now casts and forecasts
Curious about how the 2014 severe weather season might play out? Eilts explains—“The biggest challenge for the weather industry when using Big Data solutions is not in the volume of the data we deal with, but instead in the fact weather data is very volatile. This means every few seconds we get new data and every hour we get results from models we run internally.” WDT aggregates petabytes of weather data from global sources such as surface observing stations, radars, lightning networks, and satellites. The company’s proprietary capabilities include processes to control the quality of raw data.
Weather is a very horizontal industry, meaning that high-value weather information that provides a customer with actionable information can be used by most industries. WDT focuses on a few key verticals including energy, aviation and local media. One of WDT’s longstanding clients is a large energy exploration and production company that has assets at over 100 locations across North America. In a recent severe thunderstorm event, WDT’s analytics and alerts provided this client with information to move personnel to safe locations before tornadoes caused damage at one of their facilities, while another location was threatened by lightning at the same time. Even during this time, they were able to keep production going by moving employees to a safer location until an all clear was provided by WDT.
WDT’s expert data scientists and software engineers are continuing to develop new methods to handle the combination of more dense and volatile data. The team is creating more complex analytics engines, pushing the envelope in computing resources, cloud services and Big Data solutions. WDT is on a strategic vision to continue to expand globally. “We are canvassing the globe to access new data sources like Doppler Radars and surface observations. We are also running our models at ever increasing resolutions and over larger and more diverse domains,” says Eilts.
Company
Weather Decision Technologies
Headquarters
Norman, OK
Management
Mike Eilts, President and CEO
Description
Provides organizations with weather decision support on a global scale.