CDC Ixis Capital Markets has its own weatherman. In May, the French bank established a weather derivatives desk and, striving for innovation, employed a meteorologist on its four-person weather risk team.

Most weather risk dealers outsource their weather data requirements to third-party providers, who transform patchy, ‘raw’, meteorological (or ‘met’) office weather data into reliable figures through filling in any gaps – a process known as cleaning, which involves

advanced modelling and