The Climate Corporation builds on success of free Climate Basic service for farmers with new functionality

Date:03-02-2015

Climate Basic™ is a free web and mobile app, used by farmers on more than 50 million acres in the U.S., that helps farmers optimize their daily decision making with field-level weather information. This spring, the tool will deliver an even simpler user interface for farmers, an upgraded notifications system, and added scouting functionality.

“This year in Climate Basic, farmers can easily identify historical and predictive rainfall, crop growth stage, and current and future radar from their home screen,” said Gary Rudolph, senior director of mobile engineering. “Last year, farmers told us they liked the notifications functionality in Climate Basic that enables them to receive alerts when their fields are exposed to significant weather events.  New this year, farmers can receive notifications across all their devices, web and mobile, and can retain them for their records,” said Rudolph.

Coming this spring, Climate Basic will also include key scouting functionality. “Farmers will be able to add scouting notes easily in the field, add photos to their notes, and share their scouting records with their agronomist, retailer, or other trusted advisor,” said Rudolf.  “It’s essential to offer these tools both online and through our mobile app because we know access to scouting tools anywhere, anytime is important to our farmer customers as they monitor their fields throughout the season.”

The additional functionality in Climate Basic this year continues to be supported by the most advanced weather modeling capabilities available in the industry today.  Valliappa “Lak” Lakshmanan, is director of meteorology for The Climate Corporation and leads a team devoted to capturing and analyzing weather data to feed the data models that power the company’s suite of products and services.  “Our precipitation estimates are powered by widespread radar coverage, enhanced by the surface observations from more than 30,000 weather stations across the U.S.,” said Lak.
 
“We process more than 800 million data points, identifying and removing flawed data as a part of that process, to produce our rainfall estimates so farmers can make management decisions with confidence.”

Farmers who sign up for Climate Basic can be sure they remain owners of any data they provide as a part of using the service and can remove their individual data from the service at their request.