What’s the weather like?

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So, I’m Dutch. And Dutch people have a special relation with the weather. The reason for this is that it is constantly changing. In countries and societies where the weather is stable, there is no need to discuss it. Can you image, in the middle of the Sahara desert, you come across a Nomad and start the conversation with: “Lovely weather, isn’t it? Wonder if this will last for the next couple of days…!”

To be honest with you, it doesn’t rain too much in The Netherlands. There is a guy in Holland that bikes to his work nearly every day. It takes him 40 minutes for a single ride and he keeps tedious records whether it rains or not. And he publish it to the internet. After 204 rides, not even 9% turned out to be “wet-rides”. (8,8% to be precise). His mantra is: “Go biking!”, And why not?

Of course, the nasty thing about rain is that it can spoil many things. Like a nice planned BBQ. In Holland there seems to be a kind of Supreme Being deciding that the friendly Dutch are only allowed 10 BBQ friendly days a year. When you miss it, you missed it and there is no After Sales Service to claim back your lost BBQ-day.

So, the Dutch are extremely aware of the weather for the coming days, and perhaps of the yearly BBQ quota, the Dutch Meteo services are pretty accurate. More accurate, I found than in the Montpellier area. Nothing to do with the capabilities of the French Meteo, but because it is more difficult to predict, I guess. Since The Netherlands is called like it is shaped, there are no mountains or other big obstacles that can change the weather dramatically. If there is another low pressure area in the vicinity of Iceland, we can predict the hour, minute and perhaps the second it will start to rain in my street. In the South of France it is a different story with the Mediterranean and mountains close by.

IBM and weather. The first time I noticed the combination was during the Atlanta Olympics (1996) in the era that IBM was the main IT sponsor of the Games. In combination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration IBM Scientist build one of the first parallel processing supercomputers for modelling weather, Deep Thunder. It ran on the same architecture as the famous IBM Deep Blue, the one that defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov a couple of years later. Back then the system was called RS/6000 SP, now called Power Systems. One of the reasons for the Deep Thunder project was to predict if there was a tornado trying to spoil some Olympic ceremonies. It was the first attempt to make a prediction, not so much for a large area but pinpointed down to a stadium.

On CeBIT, I saw that IBM is still in the “weather-business” and that the Deep Thunder has been evolved over time. Rio de Janeiro used it in the World Champion Football tournament and will use it for the Olympics as well.

And now IBM has announced it will invest heavily in the Internet of Things (IoT) and at the same time announced a partnership with The Weather Company. The announcements are linked for combining weather data with traditional business data and even with IoT data (the thousands of sensors measuring pressure, temperature etc) will surely get more insights. Those insights can be used by enterprises to make sensible decisions on a daily basis.

Weather is one of those things that you can’t control, but the impact can be severe. It can range from safety measures to be taken but also what is -likely- to be sold. Or needed.

So with spring coming (in The Netherlands everybody is waiting for the first SBAB (Super Being Approved BBQ ready day tomorrow), I thought it was appropriate to write about a topic that most fellow Dutchmen are having multiple times a day. And there is business in it, as IBM proofed. So, if you have a discussion with your neighbours about the weather, you can claim to your manager that you worked very hard!

Enjoy the weekend…