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Making It Rain
Illustration by Edmon de Haro
During his 11 years in the Israeli Air Force, Shimon Elkabetz (MBA 2017) had several near-death experiences related to weather. Once he flew into a foggy cloud bank after the control tower said the weather was clear; he lost sight of the runway and nearly lost control of the plane. “I was more concerned about weather than anything else—malfunction, my own error, somebody shooting at me. Weather was the number one variable,” he says. His friends Rei Goffer and Itai Zlotnik, both of whom were pursuing MBAs from MIT, also had life-threatening experiences when they were blindsided by weather during their military service. Those shared experiences led them to found ClimaCell in 2015 to provide more accurate and reliable forecasts both to businesses and to developing countries that don’t have access to the forecasting technology that many of us take for granted—not to mention the average person wondering if they need to bring an umbrella to work.
As the cofounders studied the industry, they found that while the weather changes from minute to minute, forecasting basically hadn’t changed in decades and is mostly done by national weather services. “This market is not very innovative, and it’s one of the last industries where governments still lead the technology,” Elkabetz says. Most of the industry relies on data from three public sources: staffed weather stations, mostly in airports; radar, which has coverage gaps and isn’t good at weather close to the ground like low clouds and drizzle; and satellites, which lack street-level accuracy.
While the weather changes from minute to minute, forecasting basically hadn’t changed in decades.
“If you and I wanted to start a weather company today, within two or three days we’d probably be just as good as anyone else. And why is that? Because we’d be using the same public sources everyone uses,” says ClimaCell’s CTO, Yuval Gonczarowski (MBA 2017). The idea behind ClimaCell is to gather weather data in an entirely new way—by extracting information from things like cell phone signals. When wireless signals hit atmospheric conditions like rain, for example, they lose strength. “We can reverse engineer the signal strength and get hundreds of thousands of, basically, weather stations,” he says, adding that ClimaCell has partnered with telecom operators around the world to turn their networks into massive sensor arrays. Everything is a potential weather station to ClimaCell—connected vehicles, street cameras, drones, and more. They call the approach the “weather of things.”
ClimaCell isn’t stopping with gathering data. The company has a team of atmospheric scientists in Boulder, Colorado, building proprietary weather models, allowing them to create historic, real-time, short-term, and long-term forecasts. Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, another team creates mobile apps, business dashboards, and other tools for clients. The end results are “microweather” forecasts for clients ranging from major airlines to roofing companies to individual users through a smartphone app. “We’re the only private weather company that is capable of running original and global models per customer request, instead of what the rest of the industry is doing, which is just looking at the outputs of the governmental models,” says Elkabetz.
For airlines, access to more accurate weather forecasts—both short and long term—enables decisions that improve safety and save money. “If I can tell all the airlines at Logan that snow is expected in 45 minutes exactly, versus a 20 percent chance of snow in the next hour, they can make decisions that will help them save a lot of money by, for example, not de-icing when it’s not necessary,” says Elkabetz. “In one case, we provided output of a model to a major airline, and we saved them about 240 flight cancellations and 40 diversions. That alone is worth around $20 million.” Indeed, weather has an enormous impact on the economy. According to the National Weather Service, between 3 and 6 percent of variability in American GDP can be attributed to weather.
Beyond business, ClimaCell is working on providing weather data to developing countries that don’t have the radar and weather station coverage of the sort provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In India, ClimaCell partnered with some of the country’s largest companies to turn their sensors into weather data and created an app that can send alerts to people in flood-prone areas. Last year, ClimaCell predicted major floods in India—in Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and other areas—two to three days in advance. Elkabetz says that ClimaCell is pushing to get this information into the hands of residents through its data partners and its mobile apps in the hopes of serving much of the developing world.
Elkabetz adds that among ClimaCell’s plans for the future is building products that predict the business impact of the weather. “So if I own a restaurant, I don’t really know what 20 or 50 knots mean for me.” But ClimaCell could, say, let the restaurant know that the bad weather means fewer customers, and therefore fewer staff are needed. Elkabetz concedes that many businesses don’t yet appreciate what the weather forecast could mean for them, but he hopes their product will help them connect the expected weather to business outcomes. As for how ClimaCell’s technology has changed its employees’ experience with weather, Gonczarowski jokes, “There’s no more small talk about the weather. We have to figure out other things to have small talk about.”
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