STORM2K

IBM announced Wednesday that it has purchased the Weather Company. It is essentially buying everything except the actual TV network. IBM is taking the Weather Company's digital assets, including the uber-popular Weather Channel mobile app, weather.com, and -- most crucially for IBM -- all the company's forecasting data and technology.

Through a business unit called WSI, the Weather Company licenses its data to businesses across many industries, including media, aviation, energy, insurance and public utilities. It also provides weather data for Google and Apple (AAPL, Tech30). And it owns the largest commercial meteorological database in the world, along with massive facilities that collect radar, satellite, and other weather information.

WSI says it processes 100 gigabytes of weather information each day.

in fact, three billion weather forecast reference points, as well as weather data from more than 40 million smartphones and 50,000 daily airplane flights. All this will be a perfect data set to run through Watson and IBM’s cloud computing prowess to mine for new insights on weather patterns that impact our daily lives.

Meanwhile, in the Physical Analytics Lab at the company’s Yorktown Heights, NY, research facility, a team has been working with the Department of Energy on technology that could one day (fairly soon) accurately predict when clouds will form (and therefore, rain). IBM also already partnered with the Weather Company earlier this year to provide cities with a disaster management tool as the Atlantic hurricane season began.

Now with direct access to the Weather Company’s multitudinous sensors and digital channels, IBM could revolutionize how well we’re able to predict—and plan for—weather events using data already available today.