A former AP Moller-Maersk executive has taken over at StormGeo’s shipping division, as the weather and route forecaster ramps up its response to marine climate change.

Kim Hedegaard Sorensen, who was also the head of logistics company Blue Water Shipping before leading a financial turnaround of Nordics food logistics outfit Nagel-Group in the past couple of years, is excited to become chief operating officer at Norway’s StormGeo because of its “progressive profile on climate change”.

“If you look at the data, then I think it is obvious that climate change has gained pace,” he told TradeWinds.

“That means very special weather will happen more often, and that increases the need for shipping companies to use our ­services because it is unsafe to navigate without proper weather forecasting and advice on which route to take.”

StormGeo, which spun off from Norwegian broadcaster TV2 in 1997 as Storm Weather Center, has since become a 550-person company in 18 countries.

Sorensen said shipping accounts for about 60% of its business. The company has been integrating its three main maritime services — routing; printed and electronic charts; and fleet performance management tools — into one suite of connected products.

StormGeo claims it routed 65,000 voyages in 2018 and 2019, saving its customers 1.3m tonnes of fuel. That, it estimates, is the equivalent of almost 4m tonnes of CO2 emissions.

“We have to take proactive steps to preventing climate change by saving fuel and emissions,” Sorensen said.

But the integration strategy does not mean StormGeo will move into navigational equipment.

“We are essentially a software company and we intend to stay like that. We don’t have any preference for the hardware that our customers use, and we can integrate to all of them.”

StormGeo’s journey into shipping took in acquiring Silicon Valley-based Applied Weather Technology in 2014, which was then the leading provider of weather and route forecasting for the industry, with offices in North America, Europe and Asia.

Optimising routes

In 2018, it bought Nautisk, a supplier of maritime charts and publications, from TradeWinds’ parent company, NHST Media Group.

Sorensen’s path includes being group chief executive of Denmark’s Blue Water from 2012 to 2016. He then headed TransAtlantic Industrial Shipping. The posts followed 17 years at Maersk, where he became Europe head for its freight forwarding unit, Damco.

He admitted that he has a deeper knowledge of liner shipping than the tramp business. But he said containerships and bulkers share a need to arrive at a destination port at a certain date, while optimising routes to save time and cost, and keeping ship, cargo and crew safe.

In 2017, a group of insurers brought what could have been a damaging lawsuit against StormGeo, alleging it should be held liable for losses from the 5,330-lane-­metre con-ro El Faro (built 1975), which sank during Hurricane Joaquin two years earlier.

They alleged the captain was unaware of delayed hurricane ­projections from Applied Weather. The case was dismissed after the US National Transportation Safety Board ruled that the master had sufficient information but did not use the tools available to him.

StormGeo, which also provides services to the oil and gas, renewables and aviation businesses, claims to have saved $54,000 for a tanker last November by rerouting it away from the shortest route it intended to take from the Panama Canal to Japan.

The company recommended sailing south of Hawaii instead of the more northerly great circle route via the US West Coast and across the Pacific south of the ­Aleutian Islands. Its route added 600 nautical miles (1,110 km), but avoided easterly tradewinds to the ship’s stern and heavier swell to the north.

The ship sailed 1.45 knots faster than expected along the northern route, arriving 49 hours earlier and saving 65 tonnes of fuel.

Storms may be getting wilder but less frequent

StormGeo’s shipping unit in Houston has an operating department with 12 forecasters producing seven-day forward global tracking forecasts for every storm that develops.

Its tropics watch manager, Chris Hebert, said the shipping forecasts, which include wind speed predictions, are significantly further forward-looking than those created by rival agencies, giving deeper information for vessel route planners.

Hebert, who has been forecasting storms since 1980, said the severity of hurricanes in the US Atlantic Basin may not be any worse than in the past, but now many more people live in exposed coastal locations and own expensive assets that can be damaged.

After studying records back to 1851, he said a rise in the number of storms and hurricanes correlates with the start of aerial monitoring in the mid-20th century and the deployment of satellites from the 1970s and 1980s.

Quietest in 32 years

These developments brought better detection of depressions out at sea that might not have been recorded before, because it is more difficult to measure wind speeds far from land.

No Category 5 hurricanes were recorded before the 1930s, as they could not be measured at sea and often passed their peak when they make landfall. Dorian last year was an exception.

The western Pacific has had its quietest year since 1988, with only two typhoons, Hebert added, but there has been a record number of relatively weak, short-lived tropical storms in the Atlantic Basin in 2020.

StormGeo global sustainability manager Erlend Moster Knudsen said, however, that rising ocean surface temperatures are making typhoons more severe in the western Pacific and weak storms less frequent.

Typhoon Haiyan, which wreaked havoc in the Philippines in 2013, was not a one-off; other tropical storms in recent years reached similar intensities.

Melting Arctic ice cooling the surface of northern waters is changing wind and ocean currents and is set to bring more extreme weather in mid-latitudes alongside rising sea levels. Shrinking ice sheets will also allow wider areas of water to pick up swells with wind speeds, Knudsen added.