*I wonder who the first customers are.
Rivers, lakes and seas appear on your street
(...)
Rich Sorkin is the founder and CEO of Jupiter Intelligence, a startup delivering hyperlocal climate predictions using cloud computing. His team of scientists and engineers are at the forefront of catastrophic-risk modeling.
Sorkin, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur for the past three decades, cut his teeth on databases, advanced analytics and geographic information systems. He sold one company to HP, another to Google. He said the business side of the company is made up of more people like him: “classic capitalist entrepreneurs.” About two and a half years ago, they started to think about the needs of the private sector in responding to climate risks.
“Since then, there’s been a steady but dramatic increase in the actual losses that citizens and businesses experienced as well as the perceived increase in those losses in the future. Both are important,” Sorkin told Yahoo News.
Jupiter was started to address a particular problem: Most models for disaster risk are based on past events and do not take the changing climate into account. This makes it difficult for anyone in business or government to plan for the future.
Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, focuses on some of the bigger water risks associated with climate change. He said a major hurdle for addressing these problems is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) creates maps that are universally used by architects and engineers in the planning and construction of buildings. Panels tasked with monitoring flood zones also rely on these maps — but they are fundamentally flawed....
