Pairtree For Business Case Studies
29 February 2024
Highly credentialled meteorologist, Jane Bunn, is determined to deliver the most accurate weather information possible for Australian agriculture with her forecasting platform and app, Jane’s Weather.
Victorians will instantly recognise her as the 7News Melbourne Meteorologist for the past decade. She trained as a meteorologist with the Bureau of Meteorology after completing a degree majoring in Atmospheric Science and Maths at Monash University.
A five-year stint at WIN News in regional Victoria early on gave her a great appreciation of the potential benefits better forecasting could deliver to farmers.
Jane’s Weather uses information from the top global weather models, combined with an enormous network of individually owned weather stations, on farms and other locations across the country, to determine exactly how local conditions vary from the regular forecasts.
Bunn then employs her own sophisticated modelling techniques combined with machine learning in an AI environment to deliver highly accurate, location-specific forecasts.
One of her many sources of data is Weather Underground, a network of ordinary people who own weather stations willing to share their weather information for the greater good.
“Weather Underground sprang up at the dawn of the internet and some of its tech reflects that, where it hasn’t been updated to the most modern technologies.
“We were struggling to get the right data in the correct format out of that service, so we turned to Pairtree because they had worked it out.
“By using Pairtree Pipes our developers could stop mucking around trying to solve a complex problem that Pairtree had already solved.
“This freed our developers up to move onto much better things. Pipes brings in the exact data we need to improve our forecasting.”
Jane Bunn
Various state primary industries departments and other stakeholders also have weather station networks in strategic locations across the country that are extremely useful.
“Pairtree also helped us connect to the Department of Primary Industries 148 weather stations in WA – another challenge they’d previously solved,” said Bunn. “We hope to use them to connect us to any other networks of weather stations anywhere in the country to help fill in those gaps and improve our service even more.
“We grab observations from as many nooks and crannies as we can – particularly in areas that are lacking official BOM stations – and learn from them. The reduction in error, to be honest, is phenomenal.”
Jane’s Weather’s premium service now allows clients to send in their own weather station data directly to be incorporated into the forecast calculations for their specific site.
In the spirit of collaboration, there’s a two-way flow of excellent weather data as the ‘My Farm Weather’ and ‘Spraymate’ features of all Pairtree subscriptions use Jane’s Weather forecast models.
Photo of Jane Bunn by Darren McNamara
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