IBM’s January acquisition of the former WSI—now known as The Weather Company , an IBM Business (Booth 3636)—gives the weather forecasting provider a wider, deeper well from which to draw information.

“They deepen (and) scale our capabilities,” Mark D. Miller, senior vice president of The Weather Company’s aviation business solutions group, said of IBM. The parent company’s emphasis on cloud computing and an “Internet of Things” (IoT) that draws from a variety of network-enabled structures and devices will inevitably improve weather forecasting, he explained.

“Pretty much any device out there that’s giving you a sense of what the weather is could input into better forecasting,” Miller he said. “With IBM now we are really pushing hard into this whole area and leveraging IoT to produce the world’s best forecast.”

The Weather Company continues to build out its Fusion flight operations and Pilotbrief weather briefing applications, both legacy WSI products. Fusion integrates data from multiple sources, including surface radar, FAA Aircraft Situation Display to Industry (ASDI), international and oceanic messaging and customer data to provide dispatchers with real-time tracking and decision support for all phases of flight. Pilotbrief delivers graphical weather data, airspace notifications and route planning information directly to an Apple iPad or web browser.

‘Smart’ Advice

Those products can be enriched by the data the IoT adds to numerical weather models, improving upon analytics and cognitive capabilities, Miller said. “As you look forward with The Weather Company, you’re going to see us continue to move well beyond just the weather forecast and into these ‘smart advisors,’ where we’re not only giving you the best weather forecast but we’re going to predict how the weather is going to impact both the terminal airport operations and also en route airspace. That’s going to be a layer of value-add that starts to shows up in Fusion and Pilotbrief to inform better decisions by dispatchers and ground personnel and pilots—really all stakeholders in the flight.”

The company continues to add data sources and applications to its forecasting portfolio. In June, The Weather Company and in-flight communications provider Gogo Business Aviation announced a collaboration that will see the weather firm’s TAPS (Turbulence Auto PirepIREP System) turbulence-detection algorithm hosted on Gogo’s aircraft communications servers. Gogo plans to make the capability available in November—enlarging the universe of turbulence event reporting to benefit all operations.

“The neat thing is, we’re already deployed on a number of large airline fleets and so getting the business aviation contribution will start covering more of the flight levels,” Miller said. “It creates a denser set of observations for everyone. Better data in is better forecast out, so we’re really excited about the partnership and improving safety throughout both business aviation and commercial flight operations.”

The Weather Company is also focused on new airborne technology closer to the ground. In August, it announced a partnership with AirMmap, of Santa Monica, Calif., the provider of low-altitude airspace management applications for drone operators. The weather firm’s contribution will be to supply real-time “hyperlocal” weather data, including temperature, precipitation, barometric pressure and cloud cover.

“We intend for the AirMap platform to be an easy and open mechanism for the exchange of important data with respect to low-altitude airspace operations, and this includes weather and other information sensed by drones,” said AirMap co-founder and CEO Ben Marcus. “We expect that this data will significantly improve weather forecasting models and help other low-altitude flight operations improve in safety and efficiency. We are excited for the future when millions of drones are operating billions of autonomous flights.”

Moneymaking applications of drones are expected to proliferate now that the FAA has released its long-awaited Part 107 regulation governing the commercial operation of small unmanned aircraft systems weighing less than 55 pounds.

“There are so many applications for drones out there in the industry, and all of them rely on hyperlocal weather,” Miller observed. “There are some critical inputs to a successful drone operation—clearly windspeed, low level turbulence, whether there is going to be fog or cloud cover that may obscure [(line-of-sight]) operation. We really have a unique ability to deliver these hyperlocal forecasts that can be used to support these types of drone operations.”