Nathan Lis and Andrew Moffitt always knew they had an interest in the science of weather. It took a class at Penn State to convince them they could be entrepreneurs in the field.
In 2017, the duo helped start Innovation Weather, a company that specializes in forecasting frost, crop heat stress and other hazardous weather conditions. They recently sold the company to WeatherOptics.
Moffitt works as an on-air meteorologist in Eugene, Oregon, and Lis is a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. The two will serve as consultants for WeatherOptics, allowing them to continue improving forecasting tools for use in turf, agriculture, commodities and other industries.
In an undergraduate class at Penn State, Lis and Moffitt (pictured left to right) met alums who used their meteorology and atmospheric science degrees to begin careers that took a variety of paths. That inspired them to think of how they could do the same.
They researched ways that weather could benefit a societal need and quickly found there wasn’t anything available for frost or crop heat stress forecasting.
They used resources such as Penn State Law’s Entrepreneur Assistance Clinic to draft the operating agreement and Happy Valley LaunchBox to get their startup off the ground. The entrepreneurs were invited to present at one of President Eric Barron's presidential tailgates in 2017. A grant from the National Science Foundation gave them the financial means to meet with and assess the needs of their clients.
Through market research, the team found frost forecasting to be a solution that farmers, turfgrass managers and commodities traders were unaware of. They developed algorithms that combine a variety of weather variables to determine the likelihood that frost will form in an area of interest under certain meteorological conditions.
These forecasts, available on an hourly scale up to 60 hours out, are then incorporated into street level data visualization using Google Maps. The frost prediction maps apply color scales to the probability of frost and look similar to temperature maps that depict the weather.
- Information from Penn State University