Jupiter in the news

Jupiter Intelligence uses human and artificial intelligence to help companies look into the future and see the potential impact of climate change on their businesses. “The world needs that kind of information,” says CEO Rich Sorkin. “The world is not moving fast enough to reduce climate change. The impact of climate change is getting worse every year.”

Jupiter, a climate advisory group, recently showed me the type of modeling it is performing for banks and insurance companies in the US. Using a synthetic portfolio of 100,000 residential mortgages in southern Florida — based on the exposure of a real bank — Jupiter forecasts a tripling of losses from flood damage in the next couple of decades.

The Weather Channel talks to our CEO about how merging climate models, high definition mapping, and cloud computing can help businesses add climate change predictions to their investment decisions.

One company that specializes in Earth observation is Jupiter Intelligence. It provides services to help customers understand how they will be affected by changes in the Earth system such as climate change. We spoke to Rich Sorkin, Jupiter’s CEO, to learn more about the firm.

CNBC spotlights Jupiter in an interview with CEO Rich Sorkin for its Rising Risk series on climate change. “If you were a major corporation 10 years ago and somebody said ‘cyber risk,’ chances were a lot of people would say, ‘What’s that?’ Now every large entity on the planet, business, financial services, governments, they are managing to cyber risks. It’s just a fundamental part of their business,” Sorkin said. “And the same thing will be true with risk from severe weather, accounting for the climate change that’s already occurred and is inevitably coming over the next several years as well.”

Two-year-old Jupiter Intelligence…combines weather data with information about an area’s environment and terrain to create “climate risk assessments.” Any company with a warehouse in a low-lying area wants to know how many square feet it might lose to sea-level rise and when that loss might happen. The company’s insurer wants to know that too.

If you run a business, or maintain a city, or plan power plants or highways or bridges, you’d like to know how bad things are, and how bad they’re going to get. That’s what Jupiter and other “climate services” companies sell. Jupiter explicitly incorporates climate change into its models for catastrophe risk, both proprietary and public, and then offers that knowledge to the kind of people who might lose money when the floods, fires, storms, and heat waves really kick in.

AI and supercomputing are rapidly shifting the way disaster planners, regulators and insurers gauge climate hazards. “I would say the last two years have represented dramatic change that vastly exceeded even our expectations about how things would evolve,” said Rich Sorkin, chief executive officer of Jupiter Intelligence, a Silicon Valley-based firm staffed by senior scientists and engineers from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NOAA, the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Rich Sorkin, chief executive officer for the analytics firm Jupiter Intelligence saw the writing on the wall 10 years ago. That’s when he founded a company he named Zeus to do 30-day forecasts for the power sector and commodity traders, using the then-nascent trend in enterprise computing. “For a variety of reasons we were a bit too early,” Sorkin said. But the effort served as a “warm-up” for what’s now Jupiter, born in 2017. Since then, Sorkin has assembled a roster of climate science all-stars including Josh Hacker from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Elizabeth Weatherhead, a specialist in arctic climate, and Alan Blumberg, a researcher in how coastal cities and their oceans get along. The goal: Provide clients with local weather projections on time scales ranging from hours to decades.

Jupiter today announced an agreement with the Hawaiian Electric Companies to provide ongoing climate risk analytics services for generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure across five major islands of Hawaii. Jupiter also recently announced a capital investment from Elemental Excelerator (Elemental), a global infrastructure innovation accelerator. The funding, as part of Elemental’s Demonstration Track, will enable Jupiter to accelerate deployment of its flood and wind risk analytics services in the Pacific, beginning in Hawaii.

Jupiter Launches Climate Data, Analytics and Technology Platform to Predict and Manage Weather and Climate Change Risks