Mark Gildersleeve is the president of The Weather Company’s business division. Here, Gildersleeve gives Wild Ducks producer and host Jeffrey O’Brien a tour of the command center in the company’s Andover, Mass., offices. Several teams work around-the-clock in the command center, pulling weather data from across the globe to build tailored forecasts for business clients. “They all have specific needs. We give them a full picture of the weather, in context, to help them make smart decisions,” says Gildersleeve.

The Meteorological Operations group – or "Metops" – analyzes global weather-front data to build forecasts for businesses as well as consumers. In March, The Weather Company partnered with IBM to help generate actionable insights about the weather from real-time data. Together the companies are focusing on new and developing arenas, including insurance, retail, and the energy and utilities sector, to deliver the type of sophisticated weather modeling that was once only available to high-tech weather stations. "Our mission," says Gildersleeve, "is to vacuum up every piece of weather data from every government and private source around the planet. We want to be the aggregator of weather content second to none on the planet."

The airline industry is one of The Weather Company’s most important customers. Airlines receive regular updates on hazard forecasts as well as advisories and alerts for turbulence, thunderstorms, volcanic ash, inflight icing, low-level dust storms, ozone, and special issues such as the unintentional release of nuclear radiation. In this photo, one of The Weather Company’s aviation meteorologists is issuing en route forecasts for his portion of the globe.

The Weather Company’s aviation meteorologists collect weather data in real-time to build regional en route forecasts for airlines and also to issue alerts for potential disruptions. “We’re creating a picture of the local airspace to share with the world,” says Gildersleeve. “We support 50,000 commercial flights a day. Servicing airlines is a really big deal because you’ve got a lot at stake."

From Auckland to Zimbabwe, The Weather Company generates an average of 15 billion forecasts a day for 2.2 billion locations with unprecedented hour-by-hour precision. All of this is made possible by cloud computing, data analytics, and of course mobile. If you’ve opted in, every time you check the forecast on your mobile’s Weather Channel app, you’re transmitting location and barometric pressure data back to The Weather Company. “We’re gathering terabytes of data per hour,” says Gildersleeve. This two-way communication has not only vastly improved forecasts, it has also forced The Weather Company to rethink its business model.

With a masters in economics from the University of Chicago and 19 years at The Weather Company, Gildersleeve has long understood how disruptive the weather can be to people, corporations, and the economy. He believes that for the first time in human history we now have the tools – in data analytics, cloud and mobile – to precisely forecast whatever Mother Nature can throw at us and use that knowledge to our advantage.