The Climate-Obsessed Have a New Favorite Website

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A few years ago, Ivo Lukacovic hauled 25 pounds of gear up Switzerland’s Gotthard Pass expecting to spend the day snow-kiting—gliding from peak to peak tethered to a sail the size of a bedsheet. But instead of the favorable conditions he’d seen in the forecast, he found himself blinded by a freezing fog and had to give up for the day. Although he always obsessively combed the predictions spit out by NASA supercomputers or crunched by Swiss climate scientists to find just the right conditions, “I’d often still fail,” Lukacovic says. “I needed to create my own version of the weather forecasts.”

Unlike most other snow-kiters, Lukacovic had both the coding chops and the money to do that: He’s a programmer who founded and still owns the Czech Republic’s biggest internet portal, Seznam.cz. Six years ago he launched Windy.com, a website that aggregates vast amounts of data to create hypergranular forecasts and assessments of climate conditions ranging from staples such as temperature, rainfall, and cloud cover to detailed looks at dew point, fire risk, air pollution, and more. “We’re the only service in the world right now that can sell this very complicated data to common people,” says Lukacovic, 45. “That’s where we want to stay a leader.”

Windy employs 15 full-time coders who translate raw files into richly animated weather illustrations, with flowing arrows that indicate wind speed and direction, a rainbow of colors for data such as snow depth, and a sidebar indicating anything from dust density to active fires. Surging interest in data about extreme weather on a warming planet—hurricanes, floods, and heat waves—has helped double the site’s traffic in the past year, to 1.5 million visitors a day. Although he declines to provide details, Lukacovic says Windy has collected some €400,000 ($440,000) in contributions and concluded several deals with companies that topped out at about €100,000 each. The vast majority of users today pay nothing, but he’s considering a €20 annual subscription for as-yet-unspecified premium services. Windy would be “very profitable,” Lukacovic says, if just 3% of users signed up.

“Windy was a real game changer,” says John Kealy, a former meteorologist at the U.K.’s Met Office who’s now researching mathematical forecasting models at the University of Exeter. “It bridges the gap between national weather services and the public in a way I hadn’t seen before.” The Prague-based company taps into the mountains of climate information becoming available as space agencies invest billions in new satellites. Windy draws data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Meteoblue AG at Switzerland’s University of Basel, and the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service, a nonprofit that offers feeds from European satellites. The latter provides Windy with air quality and pollution data, allowing Lukacovic to create animations that show where the wind is carrying nitrogen oxide, sulfur, carbon monoxide, and other dangerous pollutants. That kind of info will become increasingly valuable as countries step up efforts to monitor and verify pledges to cut emissions, says Vincent-Henri Peuch, chief of the Copernicus service. The goal is to help regulators pinpoint greenhouse gas emissions like “drops of ink released in a pool of water.”

Lukacovic faces growing competition as dozens of companies analyze climate information to improve decision-making by everyone from transportation planners to real estate agents. Assist, a software house backed by consultant Capgemini SE, is using Copernicus air quality data to help airlines reduce maintenance costs. France’s Mon Toit Solaire uses its measurements to improve placement of solar panels. Finnish startup AeroZee offers pinpointed information on air pollution to potential homebuyers.

And a host of services are broadly available to the public—AccuWeather and the Weather Channel offer vast amounts of free info and boast financial firepower, having received backing from the likes of IBM, NBCUniversal, and Blackstone Group. Lukacovic says his service can thrive because its website and app use proprietary compression and transmission systems that let its complex graphics load quickly, even on a sailboat in a thunderstorm or a mountainside in a blizzard. The goal is to cater to people whose safety and well-being often depend on knowing the weather, and who would be willing to pay for information delivered in a simple, digestible format. “We do not plan to compete with the big guys,” Lukacovic says. “Our target users are people like sailors, pilots, firemen—and kiters.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Rocks at drocks1@bloomberg.net

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