Jupiter in the news

In a Miami-Dade-focused report from Jupiter Intelligence, researchers found that moderate flooding of about a foot will affect nearly double the number of homes by 2050.

Jupiter is the start-up to keep an eye on, especially if you believe in Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

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.

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