Data-Driven Planet #31 — How Weather Data Boosts Retail
This week, we’re exploring how data science is transforming the retail industry and improving retailers’ ability to cope with the always changing weather.
“Just as consumers now expect more from retailers, retailers should expect more from their data. Using location as a pivot point for decision making, retailers can put their data to work for them the way it was always intended to be.”
— Gary Sankary
Data drives retail more than any other business. A blog post by Gary Sankary illustrates how external data impacting sales, such as weather forecasts, can be very useful in business decisions when integrated and visualized properly. Mapping weather and CRM data together, gives retailers the insight to precisely adjust their sales forecasts. Aggregating data from different sources provides insight about how can an approaching weather event impact your stores, your customers, and your staff.
Sentinel 3 data access for beginners. Sentinel 3 data enables a wide range of use cases: ocean monitoring, water quality, sea ice charting, ship routing, climate monitoring, land use, vegetation state, height of rivers and lakes, wildfire monitoring, and more. Andrew Cutts, an EO system architect at CGI, has written up a simple tutorial on how to get started analyzing Sentinel 3 data. He recommends utilizing the Sentinel hub. As a main tool for processing the data, the ESA built Science Toolbox Exploitation Platform is the best option with which to start.
Hidden value of water data. Today approximately 1.8 billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, and nearly 2 billion people to sanitation. Extreme weather events worldwide, including droughts, are provoking migration and dislocations with widespread consequences. This is why many countries treat water data as a matter of national security, unwilling to share it. But collecting global weather and climate data and correlating it with relevant social data would help to create early warning systems to help predict and plan for water-related crises. The above gives a high priority to innovation in the field of gathering water data and creating new data products.
Race to provide commercial weather data heats up. Spire and its competitor GeoOptics are participating in a pilot project, announced by NOAA, to determine whether it can cut costs by using commercial weather data. The commercial satellites provide radio occultation data, which can be used to create precise temperature profiles of the atmosphere to feed into weather-forecasting and climate models. Weather forecasters around the world feed about 40 million environmental measurements into their models each day. Only 2,100 come from radio occultation, but that data has an oversized impact on the overall accuracy.
GOES-R satellite has submitted its first images. On January 15th, GOES-16 (its updated callsign) started to send back pictures. Compared to the previous generation of GOES satellites, it has three times the spectral channels capturing images at four times the resolution, with five times the efficiency. NOAA has already published a gallery listing the best images from the brand new satellite.
Thanks for reading! Are you a fan of weather / climate / environmental data? In Planet OS we have built a open data catalog and APIs for discovering and accessing sensor data. I suggest to give a look, especially if you’re thinking to build your own data-driven application.
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