The Weather Company's Global Radar Mosaic Process

The Weather Company (TWC), an IBM Business, produces radar mosaic imagery (NOWrad), that provides global, high resolution analyses of precipitation occurring at or near the Earth’s surface. The NOWrad product is a vital piece in many of TWC’s B2B and B2C product suites including current conditions and precipitation alerting. Recently additional radar datasets have been incorporated into the NOWrad product, including single site radar data from Germany, Netherlands and France.

In order to meet the processing and business needs of supporting a global radar mosaic, TWC migrated from physical hardware to a cloud based solution. In addition to expanding resources, the migration from on-prem systems to a cloud system provided TWC with a complete development stack, including a full end-to-end software QA environment. These new capabilities have provided for a quicker time to market on new radar mosaic products and features in 2019.

Alongside the process of migrating NOWrad to the cloud, TWC’s Human Over The Loop (HOTL) system provided the capability to manually quality control on a global scale. HOTL, based on TWC’s TruVu Max platform, provides in-house meteorologists a capability to remove non-precipitating echoes from NOWrad by comparing radar echoes with other datasets such as high-resolution satellite and lightning.