When meteoblue was founded in 2006 as a spin-off of the University of Basel, the smartphone revolution had not yet arrived, cloud computing was a curiosity, and most people who wanted a forecast waited for someone on television to give them one. Weather data existed in abundance, but it moved slowly, was provided at coarse resolution and was consumed by humans rather than machines.
Almost everything about that has changed. Forecasts are now delivered through APIs at high resolution and refreshed many times a day. Archives stretching back decades can be queried in seconds, and blending dozens of models into a single tuned output, as the meteoblue Learning MultiModel does, has become standard practice for improving forecast accuracy.
Demand has changed just as much. Twenty years ago, climate risk was a topic for academic study. Today, it is a line item in financial reporting, an input to infrastructure planning, or a reason for railway engineers to model track temperatures decades ahead. Weather and climate data have quietly become business-critical infrastructure, which is quite a promotion for a discipline once treated as small talk.
A day to look back and ahead
To mark the 20th anniversary, meteoblue is hosting the Weather & Climate Summit on 20 October 2026 at memox Basel SBB. The company story of the past two decades will be told in four short instalments throughout the day, interspersed with sessions showing how far the sector has come.
The morning will offer a keynote on where weather and climate intelligence is heading. It will be followed by a panel treating weather and climate data as business-critical infrastructure, and asking what happens when the forecast underpinning an operational decision turns out to be wrong. Before lunch, a science session will tackle the harder question beneath it all: what makes weather and climate data decision-grade rather than merely available?
The afternoon will turn practical. An applied session will focus on delivery: what happens between a forecast being produced and a decision being made, industry by industry. A set of parallel workshops will then give participants something to work through rather than simply watch, from communicating extreme weather in a crowded information landscape to building urban climate monitoring networks. A closing keynote later in the day will examine the opportunities and risks emerging in the weather and climate markets before the evening reception.
The schedule leaves generous time for coffee breaks, lunch, and the reception – because two decades of collaboration are easier to build on over a cup of coffee or a glass of aperitif than across a lectern.
What comes next
Twenty years ago, few would have predicted how far weather and climate data would travel from the forecast bulletin into the machinery of everyday decisions. The next two decades will almost certainly be stranger and faster, with better models, denser observation networks, and questions nobody has thought to ask yet. Bringing clients, partners, local distributors and public-sector representatives together in Basel for a day is a good way to start finding out what those questions are.
