There is a segment of the population that needs to have accurate weather prediction on a specific day or have access to specific historical data and they are willing to pay for it. Case in point, the prediction of wind patterns for wind turbines. In France, one is beginning to see micro-local weather prediction services such as Meteoconsult or Meteopartner that are dedicated to serve micro-markets such as bread makers who need humidity data to see if they should prepare their flour on a specific day. The interesting part of this story is that they can do this because most of the supercomputer time spent on devising the weather for the world is spent here in the U.S. and freely available on the net. Meteo France is screaming that it is unfair competition that a small companies like Meteopartner can have acccess to data like this because they did not really pay for it unlike them. The other interesting part of the story is that the niche market found by these smaller outfits is precisely the type of customer that could not be a customer for large outifts like meteo france. There is a need to dedicate special numerical skills to interpolate weather data from the current and too coarse data coming out of supercomputers (20 kms by 20 kms grids.) If the smaller outfits are capable of finding enough customers, they are very likely to be the big dogs in the future because this is clearly a scenario described many times of Disruptive Technologies. Maybe learning how to solve the Navier-Stokes equation was not such a bad skill after all....
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