Does your organisation undertake inspections of weather conditions in line with longer term monitoring?
Whether you operate in agriculture or maritime, energy or leisure industries, weather is something that can greatly affect operations. Today it is possible to undertake digital weather inspection and monitoring using largely the same inspection platform that you may already use for your inspection of your tractor, vessel, oil rig or tourist bus. Paperless inspection solutions are both a powerful and adaptable tool that numerous organisations are using to now inspect weather for their records.
For many it may seem trivial to inspect the weather; that’s what the weather reports are for right? As we all know these may sometimes not be an accurate reflection of what’s happening on the ground. When your local weather station is reporting showers for your crop fields and you can only see overcast conditions, that crop isn’t getting the precipitation forecast. If you extrapolate the data and premise across a growing season, there may be stark differences in what you would expect in terms of yield amount and harvesting times. This principle doesn’t just apply for farmers, there are numerous industries that are greatly affected by the performance of the weather. Keeping an eye on and monitoring the weather is worthwhile for some businesses and organisations; so much so that many inspectors conduct digital inspections of the weather surrounding their facilities or operations daily.
Metrics such as sky conditions, precipitation, wind speed and direction may seem like a nice to have for many but for an operator of any maritime vessel they are key to what to expect out at sea. Such things can be recorded on a piece of paper but are best logged on digital checklists. By doing so, users can record the data using speech-to-text services, taking pictures with a camera, or selecting from drop-down style menus. The checklist can also be applied to certain operations such as use with a vessel that only takes one route or for inspection of a certain crop field. Not only do GPS timestamps help to confirm the data, but this can let any management get a better understanding of the trend of the conditions. It may be that whilst all the fields get a similar amount of rain, crops get better growth in certain areas; vital data for anyone concerned with crop yield. Equally, a ferry or tourist boat operator may record much higher windspeeds across certain stretches of water at certain times; another key piece of data for decision making and safety. Whilst any piece of data that can be recorded about weather conditions may seem trivial for some, such information can show unexpected evidence of results and help to explain wider performance.
