Abstract: The best-in-time forecasting system customizes its output forecast to the specific needs of a user and an identified event, which forecast is optimized as a function of the length of time between the receipt of the request and the time of the event. The best-in-time forecasting system comprises a data ingest & assimilation system that obtains the time-varying phenomena characteristic data from a plurality of external data sources and processes this information into a form and content appropriate for the needs of the best-in-time forecasting system. The processed data is stored in an information server for use by a presentation content system which functions to receive, process and respond to the user-provided information requests. A plurality of databases are included in the presentation content system to provide a subset of the time-varying characteristic data that the phenomena forecaster requires to process the forecast request.