In the face of climate change and its potential economic impact, would you like to know what may happen to your town, your street, or even a single building up to 50 years in the future?

Certainly many individuals and businesses would benefit from that data.

A new startup, launched in 2017, is using $10 million in funding to deliver such a tool. Jupiter is promising to help both businesses and governments by modeling severe climate change-driven weather events at the hyper-local level.

The Platform

Jupiter is setting up the proprietary ClimateScore Intelligence Platform that will ingest all available climate data from millions of ground-based and orbital sensors around the world to provide the most accurate and timely weather and climate predictions. Additional services like FloodScore and HeatScore are seen helping local governments and businesses cope with risks associated with sea level rise and storm intensification due to higher global temperatures.

Researchers estimate that at least $100 trillion worth of global assets may be at risk from the effects of climate change. Platforms like Jupiter’s CloudScore can also help insurers make better decisions about those risks. Jupiter has also developed tools that could provide dynamic and hyperlocal (down to street and individual building level) predictions that could help people plan for particular hazards up to decades in the future.

Sensors supply Jupiter’s platform with real-time data that would allow it to adjust assumptions and fine-tune climate models to deliver the most accurate forecasts that are validated and verified with the most comprehensive metrics.

Jupiter is run by Rich Sorkin, who used to be the boss of Elon Musk back in the 1990s. Sorkin believes that cloud computing will allow Jupiter to collect all kinds of pertinent data and process in a statistically rigorous manner. Jupiter is set to expand operations to Europe this year and to Asia in 2019.

Weather prediction is a notoriously non-linear activity and it remains murky if Jupiter can follow through. Jupiter is banking on timely advances in computing power and artificial intelligence over the next few years. Whether Jupiter will be successful or not, there is surely a large market demand for the services it promises.