Introduction

Weather forecasting and climate monitoring are public goods and have been since the late 1800s, albeit in less advanced forms.

WiHi doesn't seek to change this. In fact, we believe that, through well-designed cryptoeconomics, we can both improve the public good and build an economically-sustainable network of high quality earth observations.

History

The 1870s were a time of internationalization and globalization. It was a time of founding of the first modern, international organizations, including a very special one: the International Meteorological Organization (IMO). Preceding its founding in 1873, Prof. C.H.D. Buys Ballot, the first president of the IMO, laid out his vision (opens in a new tab) that:

It is elementary to have a worldwide network of meteorological observations, free exchange of observations between nations and international agreement on standardized observation methods and units in order to be able to compare these observations.

Since then, the IMO has matured and so has humanity's understanding of internationalization. Today, meteorological sensors are connected via the Internet and administered by various organizations, including the WMO, the successor to the IMO. Moreover, weather forecasts and climate monitoring are freely offered as public goods.

Current landscape

Public institutions, such as national meteorological agencies (met agencies), capture high quality data that is used to provide publicly available weather and climate forecasts. Increasingly, the underlying high quality data is also made available in the public domain free of charge. However, as publicly funded institutions, met agencies are severely constrained by the scale at which they can make high quality earth observations.

Hobbyist networks comprised of weather-enthusiasts have been steadily growing for the past 20 years and are a large source of non-public weather data.

Private companies, sensing a market opportunity, have taken on the mission of filling in the observational gaps of met agencies.

WiHi x DePIN

WiHi is unique amongst DePINs since we do not sell our own hardware and is very much a Pure DePIN at its core:

WiHi seeks to incentivize the existing landscape of (already) decentralized and (semi) public infrastructure for weather forecasting and monitoring.

Weather on web3 rails

The current traditional (web2) rails that modern weather forecasting and monitoring is built on works well for the average case. But to get to the next level of accuracy, precision, and ubiquity, we believe requires not only decentralization but incentive mechanisms that only web3 enables.

WiHi is the people's weather intelligence platform