Increasing the Availability and Utility of Weather and Climate Data to Meet Decision Maker Needs

Severe weather, climate risk, and related hazards impact people everywhere, causing immense damage and inflicting bodily harm. Businesses and municipalities want to know when and how weather events are likely to damage populations, infrastructure, and other physical assets, and what options they have to proactively protect the things they value, including lives, property, assets, and supply chains.

We believe making NOAA/NCEI and other data easily accessible will open up significant opportunities in a variety of markets that would benefit from environmental intelligence provided through risk assessment tools. This will allow users to discover the risks to tangible assets associated with natural disasters, climate change, severe weather, and other indicators, and make data driven decisions to mitigate those risks. A partnership among Riverside, UNC-Asheville's NEMAC, and FernLeaf Interactive, LLC is providing products to answer customers' weather, water, and climate risk-related questions and provide a tool for assessing, analyzing, and mitigating those risks. We have begun to build an industrial base for environmental intelligence and a demand for NOAA/NCEI data products. This creates a positive cycle of demand and investment between government and commercial entities.

Businesses and municipalities alike can reduce the impact of weather on their infrastructure, assets, and supply chains by understanding the risks posed to those resources by weather events. The applications we are developing provide users with the ability to assess their risk exposure arising from extreme weather events to their concrete assets and their supply chains so they may take the appropriate action to manage that risk. As we reach into additional market sectors, we will provide functionality to support risk assessment and analysis across a multitude of users, including agriculture, civil infrastructure, coastal hazards, energy, health, insurance, litigation, marine and coastal ecosystems, national security, tourism, transportation, and water.