Weather patterns are constantly changing. It’s frustrating to not have the umbrella at just the right time or the right jacket when a cold front comes through while you’re at work or were looking forward to an outdoor picnic when a storm rolls through.
Inconsistency in weather can wreak even greater havoc on businesses. In 2014 alone, the U.S. economy lost nearly $50 billion in sales and 76,000 jobs because of weather, CNBC reported.
The good news is that it’s becoming easier than ever to build apps that can help to mitigate this damage. These apps give businesses the intelligence to more accurately plan for and predict for weather changes which can impact everything from sales to customer satisfaction. Recently, IBM launched The Weather Company Data Service on the Bluemix cloud platform. The service gives developers easier, instant access to APIs that provide extended forecast data, geo-specific weather intelligence and highly dependable information.
Using Bluemix to rapidly pull broad and accurate weather data streams into their apps, developers can now build the most predictive and smartest apps for industries in which weather is a concern. They can help predict a storm’s potential impact on consumer behavior or fluctuations in crop prices.
These new APIs are built on recent IBM acquisition The Weather Company’s data platform, as well as the previously available Insights for Weather service on Bluemix. They increase the access that developers have to extended forecasts — up to 48 hours — as well as new intra-day forecasts of up to 10 days, international weather alerts, geo-coding services, and daily and monthly almanac intelligence.
This intelligence and the ability that cloud provides to easily build with these APIs means that almost every industry can benefit from working weather knowledge into its operations. For example, in the aviation industry, weather data can help airlines improve the efficiency and performance of flights, from alerting them to turbulent air patterns to planning for fuel consumption and airport congestion.
In retail, these same insights can be used for a variety of planning strategies. They can help retailers optimize inventory based on weather-triggered purchase patterns, such as stocking more sweaters for an upcoming cold front, or better plan for staffing needs, perhaps increasing the number of sales associates when nice weather is likely to bump up foot traffic.
With these new capabilities on IBM Cloud, developers now have the ability to build into their apps a real-time forecast data grid which is 100 times more precise than publicly available sources, down to a 500-square-meter resolution. They can also tie into governmental alert headlines and details, as well as the world&8217;s most accurate meteorological models from The Weather Company.
To get started with the service, check out The Weather Company Data Service for IBM Bluemix catalog, or watch an overview video on the Bluemix Developers’ Community blog.
The post Weather Company Data Service helps developers build smarter, more precise apps appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
Published by