Forward Deployed Meteorologists: Bridging deep weather science and bespoke enterprise AI

As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, enterprises are looking beyond data and seeking specialized expertise to help them navigate it. In this post, I’m sharing how our team at The Weather Company is shifting the paradigm. By combining our world-class weather science with a ‘forward-deployed’ model, we are integrating — or embedding — meteorological experts directly with our clients to rapidly build and enhance custom, AI-driven tools that solve their most complex operational challenges.

Listen to the full conversation:

Q: The term “forward-deployed” has gained a lot of momentum in AI and software engineering. What are “Forward Deployed Meteorologists”?

A: It’s a new application of something that’s been around for a while. The Weather Company’s meteorological experts have been supporting and advising some of the largest, most weather-impacted brands on the planet for more than 46 years. Traditionally, we would have a meteorologist on-site in the operation center or on call as a partner to work through weather scenarios as they become impactful and as they scale up to severe.

What has changed and why we are aligning to the concept of “forward deployed” is positioning the meteorologists at the front lines of severe events. And that is becoming increasingly important as severe weather events become more common. So our Forward Deployed Meteorologists today are on the front lines, either with the customer in the room, on the phone, or on a video call 24/7 for these severe weather battles that are happening all over the world.

Q: What is the main benefit of embedding management-consulting-level meteorologists?

A: In the past, an enterprise might hire one or two meteorologists to sit on an island within their organization. Our embedded meteorologists are part of a The Weather Company community of over 150 peers pushing the edge of weather science and accuracy. Powering our business and the analytical needs of our Forward Deployed Meteorologists is the world’s best weather science. And we operate on an enormous scale across up to 2 billion points on a map every 15 minutes, serving that data anywhere from 200-400 billion times a day.

Embedded meteorologists, as part of a forward-deployed model, mean that businesses get more than forecasts. They get a bespoke management consultant backed by deterministic and probabilistic data, ensuring highly customized operational awareness.

Q: What foundational technology and AI infrastructure allow the team to spin up bespoke enterprise solutions with speed and scale?

A: In the past, a meteorologist might deliver a custom analysis via a PDF or slide deck. What has emerged is what I would call a “weather foundry.” We have standardized backend data layers and common components on top of it.

Components like mapping, conditional triggers and alerts, workflows, and user access roles and rights are all manifested in what I call commercial off-the-shelf products. These products have a standard set of features and capabilities that are built for tens of thousands, or in the case of our consumer business, hundreds of millions of people.

What has evolved, if you think about it in terms of moving up a maturity curve, is what some technologists would call micro-apps and micro-dashboards created by a Forward Deployed Meteorologist in close collaboration with the “customer of one.”

A single airline, a single utility, or any other enterprise can now have a bespoke manifestation of those capabilities in a UI that is purpose-built for their specific requirements very quickly, utilizing those standardized components and powered by our weather foundry. We also use AI skills and templates to automate and perform quality assurance, provisioning, and testing to move these bespoke micro-apps into production.

Standard off-the-shelf vs. bespoke forward-deployed solutions

Q: How do you rapidly develop applications that transition into fully supported, enterprise-grade software rather than remaining static tools?

A: The weather foundry I mentioned and all the standard componentry have been the foundations of our commercial off-the-shelf products for years. What we can do now is tap into that enterprise-grade infrastructure with custom-built AI templates and skills, using various AI resources to facilitate the rapid prototyping of a user experience that perfectly matches the client’s complex business logic, like predicting snowfall impacts on exact supply routes.

While the front-end interface is entirely unique — maybe they only want alerts when a specific weather condition intersects with a specific polygon on a map representing their asset — it accesses our common data models securely. This gives us an entirely tailored user experience sitting on top of an unshakeable, globally scaled platform.

But data is never enough, and organizations that I’ve spoken to want that Human-Over-The-Loop oversight more than ever. As bespoke experiences are developed and move through quality and production workflows, our expert meteorologists consult, advise, and help direct the features and functions as a deliverable in the bespoke UI.

Q: Can you give us an example of a real-world use case or a practical application for Forward Deployed Meteorologists?

A: While some of our customers have adopted the full life cycle of forward-deployed meteorology, every customer is unique in terms of what level of capability and collaboration that is directly applicable to their business.

Consider an organization that only operates in five cities, and they have a very specific set of conditions that they want to monitor for those five cities:

• What is happening now?
• What is predicted to happen from a deterministic perspective in the next 15 days?
• What is predicted to happen from a probabilistic distribution perspective in the next 15 days?
• What are the longer-term seasonal and sub-seasonal outlooks for those five cities?

That is a very unique set of requirements. Using our AI skills and the foundation of the weather foundry, the meteorologists can prototype, review with the customer, iterate, and move into quality and production workflows to meet those needs. As we continue to collaborate with and support that customer, we can easily continue to iterate as they scale from five to 10 to 20 to 100 cities that they want to monitor.

Q: Where do you see the Forward Deployed Meteorologist program going in the future?

A: One of the most exciting frontiers is the ability to create bespoke data, not just bespoke dashboards. We are developing ways to create custom blends of past, present, and predictive weather conditions, weighted specifically for a client’s unique use case. A Forward Deployed Meteorologist will leverage these custom data blends to build even more accurate micro-apps.

Ultimately, we are committed to continuous innovation. By leaning into responsible AI tooling, we are amplifying our human meteorological expertise. This ensures that no matter how complex the environment gets, we can help businesses across all industries meet their operational goals at scale.