Incorporating weather data into IoT is a game-changer

Weather has long been a source of headaches for businesses across all industries.

Extreme conditions can cause power outages and supply shortages, leading to production delays. Changing resource availability, due to a blizzard or hurricane, will often raise operating costs. Severe storms shut down facilities, interrupt communications, transportation and power systems. And let’s not forget insurance prices, which can rise or may even be unavailable in flood-prone or coastal areas.

These instances may seem like outliers, but the impacts are felt widely by organizations everywhere. In the U.S. alone, it has a $500B impact on the economy. Insurers pay more than $1B per year in claims related to hail-damaged vehicles according to the Insurance Information Institute.

With advances like the Internet of Things (IoT), organizations are looking to understand the impact of weather on their operations, to anticipate difficult conditions sooner and more precisely, and to take action to optimize those parts of their businesses most likely to be impacted.

They’ll never control the weather, but by combining this data, IoT sensor data and cutting-edge analytics, organizations are finding they can control how it impacts their business.

Here are a few key industries that are transforming as a result of the integration of weather data into the Internet of Things:

The climate inside and outside a manufacturing facility can have an invisible but critical impact on the finished product. Small variations in temperature and humidity can change the way industrial glues adhere, for example, directly affecting product quality.

And this is a critical factor in the asset health of equipment, aging and changing asset conditions at different rates. A machine, for example designed to operate in 80 degree temperature will have a different lifecycle if it operates in significantly hotter or colder climates. IoT sensor data, combined with weather data can give businesses a more accurate view of the health of their critical business assets, so they can better optimize their maintenance efforts and better predict when assets will fail, helping reduce downtime.

Buildings consume almost half of all electricity in the U.S., and weather has an enormous impact on the energy draw of a building. When an increase of 5 degrees can result in a $20+ million spike in energy spending, few types of data have a greater impact on buildings and energy than weather.