Weather Source is a data provider on Snowflake Data Marketplace. It has made available a new data set to help organizations understand how weather impacts the spread of coronavirus. The COVID-19 Weather Data set includes historical, present, and forecast weather data for nearly six million postal codes around the world.

The weather data reaches back to October 2019, just prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. The COVID-19 Weather Data set is easily combined with other relevant data sets, such as another free data set from Snowflake partner Starschema, which includes anonymized epidemiological data, population densities, and geolocation data from multiple sources. More than 1,500 organizations have already accessed the Starschema data set.

Weather Source recognized prior research that found a link between weather and the transmission rates of COVID-19. “Weather does have a substantial relationship to the transmission rate, and it looks like the transmission rate increases during cooler and drier conditions,” Weather Source CEO Mark Gibbas said in a joint interview with Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman on NASDAQ Trade Talks. “To be clear, there are many factors that affect the transmission rate. There’s always going to be this normal, baseline transmission rate but during cooler and drier conditions this normal transmission rate gets a boost from the weather.”

As seen in these graphs from Weather Source of 46 U.S. counties and international cities with transmission rates of the virus on the vertical axes, and temperature and humidity on the separate horizontal axes, the virus seems to spread faster when temperatures, in fahrenheit, are between the low-40s to low-50s. The same relationship appears for climates with lower humidity.

Next, Weather Source plans to incorporate into its research data from the Airline Reporting Corporation (ARC), which is a Snowflake customer, and uses Snowflake Cloud Data Platform to improve the speed, efficiency and flexibility for its more than $88 billion in transactions per year. “By taking that into account, we can tighten our analysis by understanding how and when the virus was brought to cities around the world,” Gibbas said.

In addition to the COVID-19 Weather Data and the Starschema COVID-19 data set, the Snowflake Data Marketplace hosts a number of data sets and tools to help understand, plan for, and contain COVID-19. They are free of charge and are designed to help healthcare, disease control, and government agencies at all levels. In addition, Snowflake has received thousands of requests from other organizations to access these data sets. They seek to understand the continued impact of COVID-19 to their organizations, how they can protect their employees and supply chains, and how to plan ahead once governments begin to relax social distancing requirements.

To request access to the COVID-19 Weather Data set, click here. To request access to the Starschema COVID-19 data set, click here.