Weather preparedness means more than keeping an umbrella handy.  Jonathan Porter, AccuWeather VP of Business Services and GM of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions, explains the high cost to businesses of  just “letting weather happen.”

1. Severe weather causes tens of billions of dollars in damage each year and on average over 100,000 direct deaths worldwide.
2. Global losses due to bad weather exceed $3 trillion a year.
3. In a survey of top global decision makers from the public sector, private sector and academia before this year’s World Economic Forum, one concern dominated – extreme weather topped the Global Risks Report for the third straight year.
4. Threatening weather poses major safety risks for companies and their employees as well as risks to companies’ bottom lines.
5. Weather risks to businesses and their employees and customers can be mitigated with proactive, site-specific and customized weather forecasts and insights.
6. Smart companies are increasingly capitalizing on our weather forecasts and targeted warnings to minimize losses, increase profits and operational efficiency and keep their employees and customers safe.
7. The phrase, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody seems to do anything about it” is often attributed to Mark Twain, but is actually from the pen of Charles Dudley Warner, an editor at the Hartford Courant newspaper (and close personal friend of Mr. Twain).
8. While businesses cannot control the weather, there is plenty they can do to cope with it better – businesses don’t have to just “let weather happen.”
9. AccuWeather provides weather forecasts to more than 1.5 billion people globally and we respond to more than 60 billion data requests daily – that is over 2.5 billion per hour and 41.6 million every second.
10. We estimate that if people regularly used the AccuWeather forecast, they could save on average 16 minutes a day or a total of 95 hours a year.