[positr0n]

Do you have a source for sites like weather.com and AccuWeather being part of a billions of dollars industry? That is surprising to me.

[mikeortman]

It's hard to get accurate numbers as many weather sites are privately held. But to give some info:

Weather Company was sold for $2B to IBM in 2015 (and recently sold to private equity for undisclosed amount). Tomorrow.IO has a $1B+ valuation pre-IPO SPAC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/04/08/ibms-we...

[WrongAssumption]

That’s not really indicative of a large industry. If the weather company was bought for 2 billion, at standard valuations they were probably pulling at most 100 million per year in net income.

[keithalewis]

User name checks out.

[datadrivenangel]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AccuWeather

[positr0n]

> AccuWeather's estimated annual revenue is currently $156.6M per year.

[akira2501]

You can't safely fly or sail unless you know and can predict the weather at your destination.

[seabass-labrax]

That's not a full explanation for these companies being valuable though. Only flight planning makes use of commercial weather forecasts - the actual decisions (take off or delay, land or redirect to alternate?) are made by the pilots based on reports made by the airports themselves, usually based on their respective national forecaster's reports. Commercial pilots don't just bring up weather.com on their iPad on final approach, although their dispatcher might well have used a more sophisticated version of the same thing hours before the flight set off.

P.S. It's easy find online versions of the reports that pilots get over the radio. Here's an example with explanation for Boston Logan International, USA: https://aviationweather.gov/data/metar/?id=KBOS&hours=0&deco...