Hello Richard,

Love your blogs and particularly liked this news about travel planning on Microsoft – imagine adding our year-ahead weather content – my novel below might make for an interesting post – I am the real Captain Kirk!

Our fun, free and very useful web site http://www.weathertrends360.com or wt360.com is certain to be a hit with anyone who wants to better plan travel, vacations, weddings, parties, garden days, etc. with a little less risk from Mother Nature.

WT360 provides year-ahead daily weather forecasts for every inch of the planet, hour-by-hour for the planet, animated global short range forecats and a very cool custom alerting feature that can alert a user to any weather from the next hour to the year ahead. What makes the site powerful is the year-ahead content (no one has that), global (we do every point on Earth – no one does that) and user defined perfect weather condition alerts – anywhere in the world (no one does that).

Before you dismiss us as a technologically savvy groundhog (ha) we have been doing this for 9 years with huge clients like Wal-Mart, Target, Agway, Orchard Supply Co, Kohl’s, AutoZone, Polaris, Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Clorox, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, 3M, Unilever, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley (over 150 others in 23 countries) to help them better plan using our year-ahead forecasts to determine how much seasonal product to buy, where to put it, when to promote it, advertise and run markdowns.

We’ve won 6 major business technology awards in the past 2 years including #5 on Forbes list of America’s Most Promising Companies out of 10,000+ companies. Our short and long range forecasts are independently audited by Forecast Watch and determined to be the most accurate in the industry.

We already have over 10,000 registered users in 158 countries. Our unique content is already cropping up on consumer sites like pollen.com (allergy sufferers), tangotraffic.com, AAA.com, CharterBusConnect.com, etc. Below is all the gory details of how we do what we do without giving away the trade secrets!

Go Air Force! Sorry – couldn’t resist.

Warmest Regards,

Captain Kirk (1989 – 1999 USAF)

Bill Kirk, CEO & Co-founder

Weather Trends International

1495 Valley Center Pkwy Suite 300

Bethlehem, PA 18017

(O) 610-807-3585 (C) 484-903-6887

E-mail bkirk@wxtrends.com http://www.wxtrends.com

WTI’s award winning year-ahead trade secret forecasting technology starts with the only known historical global weather database that has no missing daily data going back 20 to 116 years for over a million grid points covering every 1km x 1km grid on Earth. Neither NOAA nor NASA has a global historical data record that matches the granularity and cleanliness of WTI’s database of trillions of weather metrics across millions of locations. Over a 100 billion metrics are added annually from 61 redundant global weather data sources including governments, universities and 3rd party firms. WTIs database took 4 years of computer time to compile in part using U.S. National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) model reanalysis data to fill in missing data records using inverse distance weighting algorithms, interpolation schemes, WTI’s elevation gridded global mesh to correct for local climate factors and bias correction algorithms.

The core proprietary algorithms that generate the year-ahead daily global forecasts for millions of locations in all 195 countries, islands and oceans were first developed in 1989 – 1994 for a handful of military locations across the world but enhanced over the past 22 years and expanded globally. Over 200,000 man hours of improvements and 100,000+ hours of computer/server time using 4+ million lines of code now generate the year-ahead and hour-by-hour forecasts in a 99% automated environment. WTI’s cloud and dozens of dedicated RackSpace hosted servers in 4 states and 2 countries provides 100% up time. The core year-ahead algorithms used are 75% math based using a combination of Gaussian Theory, Periodicity, Climate Cycles and Statistics that automatically cycle through the historical record using a multi-variable, 300 multi-step decision tree of if/then scenarios to arrive at the first guess location/grid forecast. Next, 20% of the process uses a blend of four traditional meteorological atmospheric and oceanic time series indices (PDO, SOI, QBO and AMO) to further refine the first guess year-ahead forecast. The next 4% of the process is an automated location specific correction technique to adjust for elevation and topography factors, location volatility biases and a smoothed 10 and 30 year climate trend adjustment. The final 1% is human QC from WTI’s team of 11 meteorologists (Rutgers, Penn State, Millersville and Univ of Miami) and resident PhD before the year-ahead forecasts of max/min temperatures, weather type and precipitation amounts are pushed to WTI’s B2B and consumer portals.