See this article about the rise in the value of weather forecasters and the services they provide, Wall Street Embraces Weather Risk in New Era of Storms.
This article is all about weather and predicting what is going to happen and understanding the potential impacts on business and commerce. Firms are sprouting up to use their proprietary software, like IBM buying a firm as explained in the story above.
There is another company out there today that is doing predictive work: One Concern. They started with looking at forecasting where damages will occur from seismic events and are now moving into the wildland fire and flooding realms of predicting damages. Some of their key markets should be business and insurance companies. Estimating risk and making sure that premiums cover the potential for loss is something everyone is becoming more keen about these days. Insurance has always used past losses to estimate potential future losses, but with climate change knocking and walking through the door today — we are going to need to be much more predictive than historical in our estimating losses.
Claire Rubin, Senior Researcher, shared the link above.
