Artificial Intelligence, Energy, Green Tech & Sustainability, Tampa Bay

Statweather-Was Founded On The Belief That The Weather And Climate System Could Be Predicted One Year In Advance

STATWEATHER

StatWeather was founded on the belief that the weather and climate system could be predicted one year in advance.

In the early 1990s, Statweather founder, Ria Persad worked on early climate models at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, then solar system models at NASA, then in the late 1990’s in energy and financial trading at Goldman Sachs, Enron, and Duke Energy. The Harvard and Princeton educated mathematician would apply her knowledge of modeling the atmosphere and space to inform those in commodities about the potential rise and fall of stock prices based upon the weather.

The impact of weather upon business is hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone, with trillions of dollars in impact globally. It is the convergence of math and science, finance and business, and computer technology. With the rise of computing capabilities, in 2009, Persad teamed up with Mark Carlo – a chemical and software engineer – to hire a team out of Tampa Bay, Florida, to create what would become the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence-based weather and climate model.

This model would prove to be ground-breaking in its ability to predict storms, extreme and high-impact weather such as heatwaves and freezes, and even hurricanes with a 70% hit accuracy even 3 months in advance. The StatWeather models also demonstrated landmark accuracy in predicting seasonal climate trends such as temperature, precipitation, and drought even 2 years in advance.

StatWeather’s first pilot customers in 2012, which included a roster of investment banks and energy companies, found that in the face of extreme and high impact conditions, StatWeather could be used as a highly useful commercial tool in the day-to-day functioning of a business to manage risk and predict events with reliable accuracy.

Funded by customer subscription sales alone, StatWeather was bootstrapped as a lean startup and continues as a private company with no outside capital sources. StatWeather soon garnered significant attention from the press, including coverage in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters, on this remarkable new technology as a quantum leap in weather prediction.

StatWeather has won numerous awards such as Energy Risk’s #1 Global Data Provider of the Year, top weather company in North America, Meet Advisors’ Top 5 Most Innovative Companies in America, and inclusion in Platts’ Global Energy Awards Top 10 List of Rising Star Companies.

StatWeather has become a widespread tool in the energy industry in the prediction of futures prices, utility load forecasting, and energy demand response for the utilization of sustainable energy solutions.

Founder Ria Persad was elected as the inaugural Renewable Energy and Power-Generation Woman of the Year and as a Platts’ Global Energy Awards Top 10 Lifetime Achievement Leader.

The future of this Tampa Bay-based technology company is to innovate more expansive and powerful systems in the prediction of major global weather and climate events and to be a force in helping to promote sustainable energy solutions worldwide.

StatWeather works together with industry risk management partners and government agencies such as NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) in providing users with a comprehensive SaaS platform to access weather and climate forecasts.

Data offerings range anywhere from hourly to yearly, by point-location up to region, with valuable statistical information included as to likelihood of events and post-verification statistics for customers to manage their weather-dependent risk in a uniquely effective and quantifiable manner.

Ria Persad

Chief Executive Officer Ria Persad studied mathematics and physics at Harvard, Princeton, and Cambridge Universities with doctoral study at Rice University. Her experience in climate modeling began at Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Supercomputer Center in 1991. Persad performed earth and solar system modeling at NASA and went on to model geophysical systems at Bell Geospace. She worked on the trading floors of Lehman Brothers and was a consultant to Goldman Sachs. As a climatologist at Enron and Duke Energy, she was alerted to the needs of the energy trading sector and weather risk management. She later went on to develop state-of-the-art long-range weather prediction systems, which were peer-reviewed among academia and U.S. Department of Defense scientists and rigorously tested for the top meteorological broadcasting station in the Midwest. She models complex systems for the U.S. Space Program and is an innovative Subject Matter Expert. Persad has been collaborating with NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information and their academic research partner, CICS-NC on numerous climate and energy engagement activities to advance environmental intelligence. Persad received the Highest Honor from the Society of Women Engineers and Citations from the U.S. Secretary of Energy and the U.S. Senate on Scientific Achievement on her original contributions to computational and applied mathematics. Persad has been recently recognized by Platts Global Energy Awards as one of the top 7 global leaders for Lifetime Achievement and as the International Power-Gen and Renewable Energy Woman of the Year.

Mark Carlo

Chief Information Officer Mark Carlo graduated from the University of South Florida in Chemical Engineering, has served as the President of the Florida Engineering Society, and has performed cutting-edge research on alternative and renewable energy. He has worked as a Chemical and Process Engineer and Project Manager. Carlo served as partner and Chief Information Officer of a financial services company, managing teams of financial, sales, and technical personnel. He developed innovative software products for scientific, engineering, and business applications and has designed and coded extensive financial systems, web-based database applications, and weather tracking and climate modeling systems. With a specialty in financial infrastructure and extensive leadership experience, Mark Carlo provides the technical and business oversight of the StatWeather organization including the Operations and Software Development Teams.