This report will discuss what weather data is, how it is collected, how investors can access it, and the various investment use cases of weather data.

Friendly PSA: this is intended to be a general primer on weather data. If you are already a sophisticated user of weather data, or passably familiar with it, then it is likely that you may not learn anything new here.

^{Source: NASA}

WHAT IS WEATHER DATA?

Technological advancements over the past two centuries have allowed us the ability to know what the meteorological atmosphere is at a certain place, at a certain point in time, with a certain level of confidence. It can be anywhere on Earth, as far back as the 1600s, or as far into the future as fall 2020.

This is what is known today as weather data.

Weather data also typically looks at four types of aspects – heat, moisture, air pressure, and wind – and is reported in the form of a metric (e.g degrees Celsius for heat or kilometers per hour for wind).

HOW IS WEATHER DATA SOURCED?

To report on weather, data has to be collected from both the Earth’s atmosphere and surface. Generally speaking, there are five ways that weather data can be collected.