By Randall Turk

Transcript Business Editor

Once upon a time, there was considerable risk in gambling on which way the wind would blow.

Today, predicting the weather is a surefire moneymaker.

Last week Weathernews, a global weather service company, participated in groundbreaking ceremonies for an $8 million building it will occupy on the University of Oklahoma’s south research campus. Weathernews will operate its Aviation Service Center here, providing short-term forecasts for companies like American Airlines and US Airways.

Another company, Weather Decision Technologies, Inc., began in Norman four years ago and established unqualified success in the field of proprietary weather services. Primarily, WDT is a weather “wholesaler,” selling its weather data to larger weather companies.

“We license and develop our own technologies for companies that sell our product as part of a package they sell their customers,” said WDT president and chief executive officer Mike Eilts. “As a matter of fact, we’re doing a small product for Weathernews. We’ll able to work with other weather companies that come to Norman.”

WDT forecasting products, licensed from the National Severe Storms Lab and the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms at OU, can accurately forecast the location of events like precipitation, hail, tornadoes, and where they are moving. “We’re the only company providing site-specific forecasts of weather hazards,” Eilts said.

Weather-dependent businesses, golf courses, for instance, benefit from pinpoint weather information. “We can notify 30 minutes in advance of lightning, hail and heavy rain,” Eilts said. “Nobody else is doing that.”

WDT has just been licensed for another product from McGill University in Montreal that provides four-to-six-hour highly specific nationwide forecasts of hail, storms and other severe weather.

Locally, Channel 4 TV has WDT’s “Future Track,” a forecast graphic that shows where winds are and where they will be over the next 48 hours.

Eilts said WDT has paid “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to enhance the technologies produced by weather agencies in Norman. The National Severe Storms Lab, the Oklahoma Climatological Survey and Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms provide the basic forecasting procedures that WDT modifies for more specific uses.

WDT has licensed to use the Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS), an award-winning system developed by CAPS and sold to the broadcast market. ARPS provides a model for forecasting weather events 72 hours in advance.

WDT is growing to serve an international market, mostly the governments of other countries. The company now provides services to Thailand, Hungary, Brunei and Paraguay. A contract recently was signed with Kenya. “We’ve helped the NSSL build a Web-based display for a system they built in Taiwan,” Eilts said.

International markets, which now provide about 25 percent of WDT’s business, are expected to grow dramatically over the next few years, Eilts said.

WDT has been locally recognized for its rapid growth. Earlier this year, the company was ranked sixth on the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce’s “Metro 50” list of the fastest-growing privately held companies. Then, WDT had revenues of $1.6 million among companies on the list with revenues of at least $1 million. Eilts said WDT is growing at the rate of 50 percent a year.

For two years, WDT has been a finalist for “Innovator of the Year,” an award sponsored by the Oklahoma Venture Forum.

“The WDT niche is to be the high-tech transfer group bringing new weather prediction tools to the marketplace,” Eilts said. “We have one foot in research and one in the commercial world to achieve technical transfer. Not many groups are doing that.”

The company now employs 15 meteorologists and software engineers in its Norman office, and five who market WDT services throughout the country. Eilts said he expects to hire another five employees over the next year. A firm in Arlington, VA., that has a presence in 80 countries markets WDT products.

WDT has a rapidly growing forensics group to document where severe weather has occurred. The principal client for such information is insurance companies. For a fee, companies can obtain information from Hailtrax.com. Another service HailExpress, is for roofing companies. “Some roofing companies are pretty sophisticated,” Eilts said. “They fly to cities where they know it has hailed.”

The forensics unit also records tornadoes, wind damage, floods and icing events, primarily for legal claims.

In Oklahoma, WDT is helping NEC Micon, a Norwegian company installing its wind turbine generators on a wind farm north of Lawton. During the construction phase, WDT has provided short-term forecasts of high-wind and lightning, hazardous conditions for erecting the 300-foot-tall wind turbines.

“We’ve induced a lot of excitement in the marketplace,” Eilts said. “We’re in a management growth phase. It’s just a matter of management so we can keep up with it.”