New CEO and CFO appointed; former CEO transitions to President role overseeing Enterprise business

ATLANTA — Nov. 12, 2024 — The Weather Company, the world’s most accurate weather forecaster,¹ today announced key executive leadership changes designed to accelerate growth and enhance its ability to prepare people, businesses, and communities for weather’s increasing impact.

Rohit Agarwal has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to lead The Weather Company into its next phase of growth. He brings extensive product and commercial experience with a proven track record of building high-performing organizations and transforming businesses. In his most recent roles, Agarwal served as Chief Product and Revenue Officer at SoundCloud and Chief Product Officer at CNN. He brings a track record of creating long-term growth and value through growing audiences and deepening engagement. Prior to SoundCloud and CNN, he held various leadership positions at companies including HSBC, Trustpilot, and AOL.

“I am honored to lead The Weather Company at this exciting time,” said Agarwal. “Weather is playing an increasingly integral role in business and people’s lives. Our goal is to strengthen our position as the most accurate weather forecaster and the most trusted news source in America² by offering indispensable tools and experiences to give people and businesses the information and confidence they need to make better and more informed decisions. With increased investment and focus, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to people who depend on our consumer digital properties, and businesses that rely on our proprietary weather data and insights.”

In a strategic move to accelerate enterprise growth, Sheri Bachstein will transition from CEO to the role of President. In this capacity, she will lead The Weather Company’s Enterprise business, overseeing Advertising, Aviation, Media, and Government & Defense product and solutions and client portfolios.

“We see great growth potential in the Enterprise sector, and we aim to become as prevalent in this space as our The Weather Channel® brand is with consumers,” added Agarwal. “With

Sheri’s deep industry experience and relationships, she is the right leader to expand our Enterprise business and unlock its full potential.”

Alongside Agarwal, Michael Love joins The Weather Company as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), bringing a wealth of financial expertise to support the company’s growth plans. Michael previously was CFO of Intuit Mailchimp, where he was instrumental in developing and executing the company’s financial plan. Prior to Mailchimp, Michael led finance and strategy for Home Depot’s Pro business unit and served as a Principal at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

The Weather Company remains committed to enhancing its position as the world’s most accurate forecaster. The Weather Company combines AI, advanced weather science and technology, and human expertise to deliver unparalleled weather forecast accuracy. Its forecasts are 3x more likely to be accurate than those of its closest competitor, a testament to its decades of meteorological expertise, deep understanding of consumer behavior, and data science proficiency.1

This combination of human expertise and advanced technology is perhaps best known within its digital consumer properties – The Weather Channel app, weather.com, Weather Underground app, wunderground.com, and Storm Radar app. The Weather Channel brand connects with more than 360 million consumers wherever they are with data-driven insights that go beyond the forecast to help people make more confident decisions when planning outdoor activities and travel, as well as information on how weather affects their health and well-being.

Through its Enterprise business, which includes offerings for broadcast, media, aviation, advertising technology, and weather data and intelligence solutions for a variety of other industries, The Weather Company delivers meaningful insights to businesses increasingly affected by weather in their decision-making processes.

About The Weather Company
The Weather Company helps people and businesses around the world make more informed decisions and take action in the face of weather. With its deep industry expertise and highly accurate, high-volume weather data combined with advanced technology and AI, The Weather Company provides insights and solutions that harness the power of weather in a scalable, privacy-forward way. The world’s most accurate forecaster, the company serves hundreds of enterprise customers across media, advertising, aviation and more, and is trusted by hundreds of millions of monthly active users via digital properties from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com). For more, visit weathercompany.com.

Trial aims to increase mission success, reduce costs and protect lives by integrating new technology and superior data within synthetic environments

ATLANTA – Nov. 7, 2024 – As the battlefield undergoes transformation, so does the need for understanding  weather’s impact. In a changing climate characterized by erratic swings in weather patterns and increased intensity of severe weather events, the reliance on accurate and reliable weather data for operational, strategic, and infrastructural decisions has never been more critical. Traditional, synthetic weather simulations fall well short when it comes to replicating real-world conditions on land, at sea, and in the air.

As part of its collaboration with SimCentric, The Weather Company will be providing integrated weather data, visualization and risk analytics for Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025. Exercise Talisman Sabre is the largest combined military training activity between Australia and the United States plus 23 other partner nations, and happens every other year. For the first time at a large-scale joint defense exercise, live weather data aligned to training event profiles and risk thresholds will be available to help defense training and simulation leaders improve efforts across distributed training areas and diverse exercise profiles.

While many current simulations and digital twins have used synthetic weather, The Weather Company’s Weatherverse™ solutions deliver real weather information, based upon historical, current and forecasted datasets and weather models, for use in live, virtual and constructive simulation environments at a global scale. The Weather Company uses advanced analytics to automatically detect weather-related impacts on training exercises tied to specific locations, enabling better informed insights, more confident decision making and improved outcomes.

The Weather Company’s Weatherverse Planner™ Plugin deployed within SimCentric’s military planning and live training monitoring solution SAF-FORESIGHT will be employed in planning for Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025, which will take place in July and August next year across the Indo-PACOM region. Designed to test forces in planning and conducting joint, coalition military operations, Talisman Sabre aims to improve the combat readiness and interoperability between partner nations.

A view of weather conditions over Northern Italy, as seen in Weatherverse Planner. Color coding is based on set thresholds for each condition to help personnel more easily gain situational awareness of weather risk.

This incorporation of weather data from the world’s most accurate forecaster¹ into SAF-FORESIGHT enables its seamless integration into planning and operational processes. Access to current weather conditions, forecasted conditions, summary dashboards and weather data allows for more interactive and intuitive visualizations, helping customers better understand and prepare for the actual effects of weather conditions on the safety and outcome of training exercises.

Weather conditions can affect a broad range of military operations, such as soldier deaths due to extreme heat or cold, littoral risks in high sea states, the dangers of low visibility and electrical activity on helicopter maneuver, misjudgment of tidal patterns on platform insertion, fire danger for high explosive munitions and severe injuries from parachuting in high winds.

“Globally, we’ve seen evidence of weather’s impact creating risks and ongoing dangers to personnel and platforms, in addition to the potential inability to conduct training in certain weather conditions leading to reduced military readiness,” said Dr. Adam Easton, CEO of SimCentric. “We continue to evolve and improve our world-class SAF-FORESIGHT technology, and working with The Weather Company helps us deliver to military planners and stakeholders practical tools that enable them to plan training effectively, mitigate key risks at a system level, and achieve the balance between realism and risk that all military training must resolve.”

SimCentric is working with The Weather Company to enhance safety in training by integrating reliable real-time weather data into SimCentric’s SAF-FORESIGHT live training safety software. This cooperation aims to leverage the innovation and leadership of both companies to facilitate a new range of holistic, system-level risk mitigation measures to be employed by users of SAF-FORESIGHT, a unique live training safety tool that ultimately strives to save lives and reduce injuries in training.

“As weather grows more disruptive and impactful on operational and planning requirements, it’s increasingly clear that leaders within the defense space require increasingly reliable, real-time weather intelligence,” said Sheri Bachstein, president of The Weather Company. “Cooperating with innovators like SimCentric and as part of the Talisman Sabre exercise has helped crystallize how critical it is to incorporate reliable, globally scaled weather data and insights into simulation environments such as defense planning and live training scenarios to help improve confidence in both decision making and outcomes.”

In addition to working with SimCentric, other defense industry leaders including many of the top prime contractors are actively exploring how best to leverage Weatherverse solutions to help improve the effectiveness of military planning, as well as live, virtual and constructive simulations. Users of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine for visual rendering can now leverage Weatherverse Sim as a plugin to integrate weather data into Unreal-powered simulation environments, whether offline or via API. Additionally, The Weather Company is working with NVIDIA to make Weatherverse capabilities also available on NVIDIA Omniverse,™ the platform for connecting and developing OpenUSD applications.

About SimCentric
SimCentric is a technology company focused on transforming training, safety and operational decision making through innovation.  We develop commercial, off-the-shelf technology and strive to be thought leaders and innovators in the areas of: Joint Fires training, Range Safety, fratricide prevention, and Virtual Unreal Engine training environments. For more, visit simct.com.

About The Weather Company
The Weather Company helps people and businesses around the world make more informed decisions and take action in the face of weather. With its deep industry expertise and highly accurate, high-volume weather data combined with advanced technology and AI, The Weather Company provides insights and solutions that harness the power of weather in a scalable, privacy-forward way. The world’s most accurate forecaster, the company serves hundreds of enterprise customers across media, advertising, aviation and more, and is trusted by hundreds of millions of monthly active users via digital properties from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com). For more, visit weathercompany.com.  

For the first time, users of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine can now integrate high-fidelity global weather data into Unreal-powered simulation environments, whether offline or via API. 

ATLANTA – Nov. 7, 2024 – As weather grows more disruptive and impactful for people and businesses, it’s increasingly clear that proper planning requires reliable weather intelligence. As a provider of actual weather data for use in live, virtual, and constructive simulation environments, The Weather Company today announces Weatherverse^TM Sim for Unreal Engine is now available via plugin. Users of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine can now integrate offline or API-provided weather data for visual rendering within simulation environments. With access to high-fidelity weather data from the world’s most accurate weather forecaster,¹ anyone using Unreal-powered visual rendering can better visualize and understand the actual effects of weather conditions in an interactive and intuitive manner.

While many current simulations and digital twins use synthetic weather, The Weather Company’s Weatherverse™ solutions deliver real weather data, based upon historical, current and forecasted datasets and weather models, for use in planning and simulation environments at a global scale. This enables better informed insights, more confident decision making and improved outcomes where weather is a contributing influence.

“It’s no secret that weather impacts all of us every day. Whether you’re animating films, developing games, or creating 3D models or immersive experiences, being able to integrate realistic weather requires the most accurate forecasts and a trusted weather partner,” said Sheri Bachstein, president of The Weather Company. “This plugin is for anyone running simulations using the Unreal standard for visualization and who require the integration of actual, real-time weather conditions, rather than synthetic data and the limitations that can bring.”

A view of the actual weather in Washington, D.C. on a foggy day, as visualized within Weatherverse Sim by The Weather Company.

About the Technology: Better Accuracy Means Better Visualization

At the core of Weatherverse Sim is The Weather Company’s own GRAF system, a high-precision, rapidly-updating global weather modeling system capable of predicting phenomena as small as a thunderstorm virtually anywhere on the planet. The GRAF model uses high-resolution data to provide current and forecasted weather activity worldwide. As part of a continued collaboration with NVIDIA, The Weather Company will continue to advance weather forecasting, driven by AI, with GRAF to get an even more accurate forecast focused on high-resolution needs to help fuel business decisions with actionable forecasts and insights.

Weatherverse Sim utilizes the GRAF model to inject real weather data into planning and simulation environments, delivering accurate conditions from the surface up to 55,000 feet in elevation, in 1,000-foot increments. This results in hyper-realistic visual recreations of weather conditions, including clouds, precipitation, humidity, and visibility. Additionally, the data supports existing physics models in simulators, encompassing critical elements like turbulence, which, although invisible, can significantly impact objects and environments. For enhanced simulation rendering, Weatherverse Sim even incorporates probabilistic weather forecasts that express predictions as a range of possible outcomes with associated probabilities.

Weatherverse Sim for Unreal Engine can access current and forecast data anywhere around the globe from offline datasets as needed or, more commonly, via customizable API services tailored for each instance. Recognizing the diverse ways weather data can be used, The Weather Company offers variants to support a broad range of requirements—from simpler simulators that only need weather data for surface conditions to advanced Level-D simulators that benefit from increased fidelity with up to 50 additional vertical layers of data in 1,000-ft increments up to 55,000 feet in elevation. In every case, users can benefit from high-end, realistic weather condition visualizations for simulation needs anywhere in the world.

This plugin for Unreal Engine users is the next step in providing revolutionary weather capabilities to new audiences. Over the past year, The Weather Company team has been hard at work continuing to innovate and extend its expertise in weather forecasting into new markets with cutting-edge solutions. As one example, defense industry leaders and leading prime contractors are actively exploring Weatherverse solutions to improve the effectiveness of military planning, training and simulation outcomes. For more about Weatherverse SIM, visit www.weathercompany.com.

About The Weather Company
The Weather Company helps people and businesses around the world make more informed decisions and take action in the face of weather. With its deep industry expertise and highly accurate, high-volume weather data combined with advanced technology and AI, The Weather Company provides insights and solutions that harness the power of weather in a scalable, privacy-forward way. The world’s most accurate forecaster, the company serves hundreds of enterprise customers across media, advertising, aviation and more, and is trusted by hundreds of millions of monthly active users via digital properties from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com). For more, visit weathercompany.com. 

Predictive storm tracking solution offers hyperlocal, street-level severe weather and news alerts 
across 70+ stations within Sinclair Broadcast Group

ATLANTA – October 29, 2024 – To help keep their communities safe and informed of the latest weather information, broadcasters need accurate, compelling and flexible tools built on the latest technology. On-screen crawling alerts deliver some of the most critical updates during severe weather threats, when stations see large spikes in viewership. The Weather Company today announced that WKRC-TV, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s television station in Cincinnati, has recently upgraded its weather alerting platform to Max Alert Live from The Weather Company to help ensure the reliability and trust its viewers depend on. Sinclair Broadcast Group has also made the tool available to over 70 of its U.S. stations.

“When severe weather strikes, our viewers depend on us to deliver urgent updates that keep their families safe,” said John Gumm, chief meteorologist at WKRC-TV. “With Max Alert Live, I can see storms coming with an incredible level of granularity and quickly communicate those threats in a flexible manner. I can automatically broadcast and visualize county-by-county storm threats without disrupting programming.”

Max Alert Live is a severe weather alerting platform that helps broadcasters stay ahead of weather threats so viewers can stay in the know. Reliable data and graphics from The Weather Company, the world’s most accurate weather forecaster,¹ help pinpoint the path, timing and intensity of storms down to a specific neighborhood up to 6 hours in advance. Max Alert Live then automatically renders the alerts, allowing WKRC to keep its viewers updated with customizable graphics, maps and crawls, as well as automatic delivery of targeted storm warning and alerts.

Cloud-based remote access allows broadcasters to manage alerts from anywhere with an internet connection, ensuring seamless coverage and uninterrupted severe weather alerting. Crawls and graphics can match a station’s current on-air look and dynamically adapt to changing weather conditions and urgency. Broadcasters can tailor trigger conditions, frequency, maps, graphics and text in an easy-to-use interface, as well as integrate rich graphical content already created within an existing Max account from The Weather Company.

Key capabilities and benefits for viewers include:

• Warnings displayed while watching other shows: Flexible programming integration allows critical radar maps, customized alert crawls and live county-by-county warning graphics to be overlaid onto regular broadcasts without disrupting live shows, and across OTT, web, mobile and social channels.
• Hyperlocal, customized alerts: High-resolution live radar maps give a 3D view of storms and tropical threats with neighborhood-level precision to help viewers best prepare for severe weather.
• Quick and engaging weather notifications: Direct integration with National Weather Service data triggers automatic weather watches and warnings to scroll across the bottom of the screen, with added details or images if desired.
• One-stop shop for weather and non-weather alerts: Beyond weather notifications, viewers can also see alerts on school closings from BTi. Max Alert Live also provides the ability for manual alerting to share sports scores, news headlines and more coming soon.

“As extreme weather grows more intense and impactful, it’s critical that broadcasters have the most powerful technology to help keep their communities safe and informed,” said Bill Dow, head of enterprise product from The Weather Company. “Combining the nation’s most robust radar data and severe weather alerting with high-resolution graphics and remote cloud capabilities, Max Alert Live is revolutionizing how innovative broadcasters like WKRC and those across Sinclair’s station group communicate urgent weather information to their communities.”

Learn more about WKRC’s use case with Max Alert Live.

Max Alert Live is commercially available today as part of The Weather Company’s Max suite of solutions urpose-built for media companies. For more information, visit weathercompany.com.

About The Weather Company
The Weather Company helps people and businesses around the world make more informed decisions and take action in the face of weather. With its deep industry expertise and highly accurate, high-volume weather data combined with advanced technology and AI, The Weather Company provides insights and solutions that harness the power of weather in a scalable, privacy-forward way. The world’s most accurate forecaster, the company serves hundreds of enterprise customers across media, advertising, aviation and more, and is trusted by hundreds of millions of monthly active users via digital properties from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com). For more, visit weathercompany.com.  

New ‘Weather Means Business’ report highlights the growing influence of volatile weather patterns on business resilience, growth, and competitive advantage

ATLANTA – Oct. 2, 2024 – The Weather Company, the world’s most accurate weather forecaster,¹ has released a groundbreaking report, ‘Weather Means Business,’ highlighting the crucial role of weather intelligence in shaping business resilience, growth, and competitive edge as the world adjusts to escalating global temperatures and volatile weather patterns.

In 2024, the world saw 15 straight months of record-breaking temperatures and the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane in history, Hurricane Beryl.² In 2023, the U.S. saw 28 separate billion-dollar weather disasters, totaling $93 billion in damages.³ It is more vital than ever for businesses to rethink their strategies when navigating these weather and climate challenges.

By combining accurate weather data with AI and human intelligence, businesses can convert data into actionable insights that drive better informed decision-making. From optimizing supply chains to refining advertising and marketing strategies to demand forecasting, weather intelligence has real-world applications with real financial impact to the top and bottom lines.

The report includes new survey data from Magid and reveals that 75% of executives say that weather has had a moderate or high impact on their business across all functions, with half indicating that this impact has grown over the past five years. Additionally, 100% of executives agree that weather intelligence can help gain a competitive edge, though how that advantage materializes varies by industry and specific business needs.⁴

The Weather Company’s ‘Weather Means Business’ report highlights the power of weather intelligence across a variety of business sectors including retail, CPG, pharma, insurance and travel & tourism. According to the findings, businesses that successfully harness weather intelligence can expect revenue boosts of as much as 10% and significant cuts in operating expenses.

“The critical role of weather intelligence as a change agent in modern business cannot be overstated,” said Sheri Bachstein, CEO, The Weather Company. “A weather strategy for any business- small, medium, or enterprise – is not one-size-fits-all. To be effective, the weather strategy must be tailored to the unique needs of each business function.”

The report further found that 78% of executives surveyed say incorporating advanced weather analytics into their decision-making processes could enhance their ability to anticipate and respond to market fluctuations, while 77% said using weather insights effectively can help them be better at their jobs.

Looking further at industry verticals, 80% of retail executives agreed that enhanced weather intelligence has the potential to contribute positively to annual revenue growth, while 90% of pharma executives said that harnessing weather data can serve as a strategic advantage for their organization. 93% of travel executives also estimated that environmental and weather conditions have impacted their operating costs and revenue by 50% or more over the past year.

For a detailed look into how weather intelligence can transform your business, and for breakouts covering the specialized impact on the retail, CPG, pharma, insurance and travel & tourism industries, download the full “Weather Means Business” report here.

Methodology 

This whitepaper leverages a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative research study conducted by an independent research company, Magid, involving 297 C-suite and VP-level executives from U.S. companies across five industries, representing a range of job functions from Revenue & Finance, Operations, Supply Chain to Advertising, Marketing, and  Customer Experience.

About The Weather Company
The Weather Company helps people and businesses around the world make more informed decisions and take action in the face of weather. With its deep industry expertise and highly accurate, high-volume weather data combined with advanced technology and AI, The Weather Company provides insights and solutions that harness the power of weather in a scalable, privacy-forward way. The world’s most accurate forecaster, the company serves hundreds of enterprise customers across media, advertising, aviation and more, and is trusted by hundreds of millions of monthly active users via digital properties from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com). For more, visit weathercompany.com.