IBM has finally combined literal clouds with cloud computing. On Wednesday, the company announced that it will acquire most assets of the Weather Company, notably excluding The Weather Channel television network. IBM intends to pair its artificial intelligence business, Watson, with the vast weather data repository of the Weather Company. The deal is reportedly worth $2 billion.

The Weather Company includes online brands such as weather.com, wunderground.com, and intellicast.com as well as a business-to-business enterprise. It collects weather data from more than 40 million smartphones and 50,000 airplane flights per day. The company’s data supports both the Weather Company’s own apps as well as 26 billion third-party requests each day. After the acquisition, the companies plan to combine this vast amount of data with the Watson computing system's analytical powers to help users make more informed decisions.

“We see the next wave of improved forecasting coming from the intersection of atmospheric science, computer science, and analytics,” said David Kenny, chairman and CEO of The Weather Company.

By analyzing weather forecasts with social media chatter and, say, transportation flows, retailers may be better able to anticipate the need for certain goods at particular times, or airlines could optimize their fuel consumption or better anticipate airport delays. Most of the employees IBM is acquiring work in computers and data rather than atmospheric science or meteorology.

Less certain is the future of the most visible product of the Weather Company, The Weather Channel. The Weather Channel has struggled in recent years to find the right mix of forecasts, weather commentary, and more entertainment-focused reality programming. According to Nielsen data, its average number of prime time viewers fell by 22 percent from 2011 to 2014, down to 225,000. In late 2013, the television channel endured a bitter public fight with DirecTV over carriage fees, and earlier this year Verizon FiOS dropped the channel altogether.

Whether a weather television channel featuring personalities like storm chaser Jim Cantore can survive in an era when most people turn to their smartphones and PCs for immediate, local weather information is unclear. IBM has made its bet on a purely digital future.