In fact, a particular service (satellite-based, or forecast-based, it does not matter how it is built) can be excellent for certain decision makers, and be completely useless to others. For example, a service indicating that the next month is going to be wet, might be completely useless to certain farmers needing to know if a certain amount of rain will happen at the beginning, the middle of the end of next month. How can then the quality of that service be described in general as good, when it depends on the actual demand of the decision maker?

Alisios’s premise is that each client is part of a unique ecosystem, so its needs are also unique, and hence the services and how the quality of such services are defined and measured cannot be generalised. We can share with you how good certain services we provide are, but it will be misleading to assume that is how good your services are.

Instead, we produce tailored retrospective forecasts (past forecasts, or hindcasts) of the actual variable(s) you need, and present a variety of metrics that evaluate multiple dimensions of “how good” your particular service is. Hence, our clients have well-defined, objective and tailored ways to assess the “goodness” of the service we provide them, for each time scale, location, spatial resolution and application of interest.