Airbus Defence & Space and weather data specialist Meteomatics have announced a cooperation agreement that the companies say will help organizations across the globe make better weather-related decisions.
Under the agreement, Meteomatics will provide customers with a real-time weather data feed including satellite-based global thunderstorm cell detection and prediction data from Airbus. It says this data has huge potential to benefit a wide range of industries, such as agriculture, insurance, traffic management, logistics and smart cities.
Airbus will deliver its thunderstorm detection data set directly to Meteomatics, which will then make the data available to its customers worldwide through its Weather API. This API gives users access to a large amount of weather data including maritime, observations, historic, current, forecast and seasonal data.
The Airbus data will be supplied from its Cb-Global system, which uses dedicated algorithms to process satellite data feeds to pinpoint the formation of thunderstorm cells. According to the company, the system provides precise outlines or polygons for every individual thunderstorm cell instead of more general probabilities for thunderstorm activities over larger areas, which are typically provided by numerical weather models
Dr Martin Fengler, Meteomatics CEO, noted that the two organizations’ capabilities were highly complementary. “The thunderstorm detection and prediction system from Airbus is a fantastic additional data source for our platform. It will certainly help our customers make better weather-related decisions anytime and anywhere, thanks to one of its unique characteristics which is its global coverage.”