

Ask YC: How self-made weather forecast can be monetized? - nelud

assuming it's good enough.  Which forecast is better - local or global, short-term (couple of hours) or long-term (hundreds of years)?
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dkokelley
The problem with forecasting is how its done. Much of forecasting has less to
do with the actual material explanations of events and more with observed
historical conditions and probability.

A 50% chance of rain means "in all of recorded history, when conditions were
similar, it rained 50% of the time," which leaves a lot to be interpreted by
meteorology advancements. It does not mean that the "rain trigger" has a 50%
chance of being pulled, since as we know, past results do not affect future
outcomes in a pure probability, and the past conditions can only be correlated
to rain, not directly tied to causation.

Also, I think there's a sweet spot somewhere in between a couple of hours and
hundreds of years. Maybe around a month would be good to start.

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rms
Don't worry about the monetization here, worry about the forecasting! It's
still an unsolved problem. 3 day forecasts on local/national news aren't that
accurate. Do better and your technology is worth a lot of money.

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utnick
um assuming its good enough... if you could predict 1 yr in advance and sell
the knowledge to brides to be for a couple hundred a pop... you could make
quite a killing

you could even offer a money back guarantee... and if the probabilities and
prices line up you dont even have to be that good at forecasting

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JacobAldridge
I read about a company doing this on TechCrunch last year

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/02/use-weatherbill-to-
bet-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/02/use-weatherbill-to-bet-on-the-
weather/)

Not sure how it's going for them, though they haven't been deadpooled.

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aneesh
> local or global?

Local. I don't care about the temperatures all across the Midwest. I care
about the weather where I am right now (Boston).

> short-term or long-term?

short-term, but longer than a couple of hours -- upcoming weekend would be
nice.

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michael_dorfman
If you've got a good algorithm that can predict local weather 3-5 days out
with a significantly better accuracy than the other players in the industry,
you won't have any problem monetizing it.

If you don't have that, why bother?

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jonp
If you can do medium-term (over the next year) then consider trading weather
derivatives. Such contracts pay out on eg the number of warm days being
higher/lower than consensus.

