Beginning tomorrow.IO has built a constellation of weather satellites to nurture data on its predictions with the personalized one for its business customers. Can it fill the gap left behind by DOGE cuts at national weather service?
from Alex knappForbes staff.
Bubbleor shimon elkabezeRampage of the Government Efficiency Department through the National Weather Service (NWS) is a confusion. On the one hand, it represents an unprecedented opportunity for his weather forecasting company tomorrow. If the degraded service increases the demand for its company predictions. On the other hand, replacing NWS was never on his road map; It is not something that the nine -year -old company, which offers personalized weather forecasts for business customers, was created to do.
But it was before Elon Musk’s minions to orchestrate up to 20% of the staff in the national ocean and atmosphere (NOAA) staff and proposed the closure of the essential objects that produce weather forecasts and while the Trump administration was not clear about what is its ending the architects of which are named after the President.
“I don’t want anyone to read this article to think that companies like tomorrow. They’re here to get business from NOAA,” Elkabez said stale.
But if Doge cuts prevent NWs from providing reliable weather data, there can be no other solution. Downloading more than 1,000 employees from NOAA in late February has already delayed the start of weather balloons that uses NWS to produce reliable data, and New York Times Reported over the weekend than more cuts are on the horizon. Meanwhile, the General Services Administration is currently reviewing the lease for a critical weather center in Maryland, where weather forecasting operations have been consolidated and centralized for the whole country.
When hearing the Confirmation of the Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick before the Senate, he insisted that NOAA expenses could be easily cut without compromising the weather forecast because he thinks it can be made more efficiently. While he did not argue for complete privatization, some climates are afraid that cuts are already degrading public weather forecasts, leaving gaps that the private sector is currently incapable of filling.
There is simply no private company that can provide weather data on the NWS scale. Almost all weather companies, from tomorrow to the weather application on your phone, rely on its data to empower their forecast patterns, even those that have their sensors or satellites. This is partly because of the width of the information it collects: NOAA uses satellites, weather balloons, terrestrial radar systems and more. Repeating that it is intense of capital, so the equipment of private companies tends to be more focused on filling in gaps or collecting hyperlocal data.
Threats to the Golden Standard NOAA for weather data were not something Elkabebetz predicted when he founded tomorrow (then called Climacell) in 2016. Then he said, his company was focused on the simple idea: while the climate crisis deteriorates, businesses from increasingly extreme businesses will increase in frequency and intensity. Businesses needed a time, reliable to obtain essential weather information to mitigate its possible negative effects. Existing services, which relied heavily on manual processes and suffered gaps in critical data, will not shorten them – especially in areas that did not have access to the type of information NOAA provides in the US
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Tomorrow’s solution was to create software that can not only provide forecasts but also concrete suggestions on the steps that a specific business should take to mitigate weather impacts. For example, it provides its airline customers such as United and JetBlue with recommendations for earthing or re-returning flights during large storms. For pharmaceutical clients like Eli Lilly and Pfizer, it offers weather alerts to optimize the transportation of raw materials and temperature -sensitive medicines. And for Chicago Cubs, it provides information about weather conditions in Wrigley Field’s player performance – how the wind can affect how far a ball will travel or how moisture can affect its speed.
Tomorrow’s algorithms were originally similar to NOAA, which rely on complex equations to simulate atmospheric behavior using the large amounts of data it collects. Recently, the company has moved to generative models of it that can analyze the data publicly available by NWS and its satellites tomorrow to produce knowledge of its customers. “Instead of talking to a meteorologist or having a manual way to make decisions, you can put software to make decisions on the scale,” he said.
Together with frequent-manual decision-making automation, tomorrow is also focused on improving the access to weather data globally. Most of the world lacks the type of comprehensive data offering NWS in the United States, which makes the production of accurate predictions for those more challenging areas. Although tomorrow makes the use of public weather data provided by agencies like NOAA, “90% of the land has no high quality data” to use them with forecast models, Elkabetz said. In particular, there are very few sensors that monitor ocean conditions, which for some places make it more difficult to predict things like tsunamis or hurricanes-even the mill storms that transport companies may want to avoid.
Earlier in the company history, tomorrow it tried to improve data collection in ways that did not require large hardware investments in satellites or radar, “because we had no money,” he said. One of those methods, for example, was the measurement of weather -related data, extracted from radio signals from cell towers, which may vary due to factors such as moisture.
This was not particularly useful, but terrestrial radar systems like those used by NOAA cost billions. And while there may be cheaper systems like balloons, they collect data only in the country. So even if the company can invest in hundreds of balloons, it would not go globally. “You can’t go to Russia or China alone and put a sensor, right?” Said Elkabetz.
This led the company to space. In May 2023, tomorrow began what may have been the first commercially constructed satellite of the weather radar, producing comparable measurements with NOAA land radar systems. One second followed later that year and in 2024, the company launched a pair of microwave satellites, which measure temperature, humidity and other atmospheric data. Two other satellites followed in December 2024, bringing its orbital total to six. In the fall, tomorrow he entered a pilot project to secure his satellite data at NOAA, which is evaluating it for use in forecasts.
In addition to the four satellites starting in March and April, tomorrow they plan to launch four more satellites by the end of the year. This will give the company enough satellites to collect data from around the world every 40 to 60 minutes, Elkabetz said, providing timely updates in predicting its weather.
So far, tomorrow has raised $ 269 million in the capital’s capital, recently with a series of $ 109 million that closed in 2023. The company refused to show an estimate, but an aborted acquisition agreement with special goals that would receive the public company in 2022 worth it at $ 1.2 billion. The deal fell, Elkabetz said, because market conditions explained that capital growth is more efficient. The company refused to declare its revenue, but Elkabetz said it has increased “very” since the $ 19 million reported for 2021 and that it expects the company to be the flow of positive money within the next 12 months.
As a result of these investments, tomorrow has “collected more money than any private weather company in the world,” said satellite analyst Chris Quilty stale. Of the spatial -based weather companies, which includes Virginia -based spires, Colorado -based planets and California -based geooptics, he said, “They are clearly the most legitimate.”
But that does not mean that tomorrow is equipped to replace the national weather service forecasts.
“That’s not my job, this is NOAA’s job,” he said.
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