National Association of Counties
What if you knew the weather...up to a year in advance? What would you do differently? Northampton County, Pennsylvania used weathertrends360’s year-ahead forecast to better plan their annual budgets. The forecast indicated the coming winter would be the 2nd warmest in decades, 10F warmer than the prior year with 75% less snowfall forecast. The forecast also suggested the mild winter would mean more savings for pot hole repair with fewer roads to fix and with a hot/dry Spring-Summer forecast, lawn/vegetation maintenance hours would be dramatically reduced as well.
With over 50 buildings to heat and hundreds of miles of roads to plow and repair, the forecast suggested they would save nearly $1,000,000 with lower heating costs alone as every 1F warmer during winter can bring a 5% decline in heating costs/consumption, 10F warmer a 50% potential savings. The snow budget would also save nearly a million dollars with less hours and dramatically less salt usage.
Rather than assume they’d have an extra $2M in the coffers after the Winter, they decided to save 20 percent. When the forecast came true with the Winter turning out to be the 2nd warmest on record – with only one snow storm vs the typical 18 the year prior, the town was able to build a park that had been put on hold with the money they saved. Simply knowing a little bit about the likely weather trends a year-out helped make the budget planning process much easier, eliminating a lot of the unknowns and surprises.
For over 16 years, weathertrends360 has worked with some of America’s most successful companies in retail, seasonal merchandise, Wall Street, Agriculture and now local county governments to help them become proactive versus reactive to the weather ahead. Eschewing traditional physics-based meteorological forecasting, it has found a better way to forecast using statistics and math based on 24 climate cycles to project temperatures, rainfall, snowfall and hurricane threats by a week out a year for every mile on Earth.
Over $10 million dollars has been invested in the technology that has now won 14 U.S. and international awards for applications and accuracy including 5th Most Promising Company in America per Forbes’ Magazine. Clients such as Home Depot, Wal-Mart, AutoZone, Walgreens, Kohl’s, Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, JP Morgan, Citi, Microsoft, Unilever, Bayer (over a hundred other Fortune 1000 clients) and smaller customers like Upper Nazareth Township have had many billions of dollars in ROI making very simple low risk decisions. These decisions include helping to plan things like how much seasonal merchandise to buy or make based on just how favorable or unfavorable the weather will be a year ahead, where to allocate more or less seasonal inventory, when to run advertising campaigns in the optimal weather, labor and store traffic scheduling, etc.
While large weathertrends360 customers pay $50,000 to $500,000 a year, small businesses, farmers and county governments can access its services for under a $1,000/year.
Below are just a few examples of what folks that work in or with local townships have to say about the accuracy and value of our year ahead intelligence:
CEO and the “Real Captain Kirk” (USAF Gulf War Veteran 1989-1999) will be presenting at NACO on 14 July at 11am to provide more details on how the technology works and how it might prove to be a low cost valuable resource for Resilient Counties to better prepare for the weather ahead. For more information visit our web site: http://www.weathertrends360.com/
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