The Big Value of Weather Data in the Big Data Economy

What does a computer company want with a bunch of meteorologists? A few weeks ago, IBM announced it was acquiring The Weather Company, which owns Weather.com and Weather Underground, and the Wall Street Journal reported they were paying more than $2 billion for the privilege. According to The New York Times, while The Weather Company employs many atmospheric scientists and meteorologists, nearly three-quarters of its scientists work in data and computers. The Weather Company was already storing most of its data with IBM's cloud computing platform, and now Big Blue has access to all that data, which they can now sell to other companies who need to know about the weather. The ability to reliably predict the weather has always been important, but people wrongly assume that weather data is only useful to a handful of industries, like agriculture and transportation.