Boston-based weather intelligence provider Tomorrow.io has announced that its pathfinder radar satellites, Tomorrow-R1 and Tomorrow-R2, have successfully characterized precipitation intensity from space. This achievement places Tomorrow.io alongside NASA and JAXA as the only entities to have ever taken such measurements from orbit.
Following the successful launches of Tomorrow-R1 and Tomorrow-R2 satellites in April and June, respectively, the company has completed initial testing of both satellites and their radar payloads are fully operational. With the initial calibration complete, both satellites are entering their longer-term calibration and validation phase, paving the way for the high-fidelity global precipitation measurements to be ingested into Tomorrow.io’s weather intelligence platform.
For the first time, Tomorrow.io demonstrated its ability in making near real-time radar-based forecasting financially viable for every point on Earth, closing a decades-old gap in life-saving weather forecasting. Currently, five billion people live outside radar coverage with no radar-coverage over the oceans.
“The precipitation measurements have already proven the overall system performance, providing significantly more insight into weather than existing satellite-based cloud-top imaging systems,” said John Springmann, SVP of space and sensors at Tomorrow.io. “With initial measurements completed, we are now in the process of growing the overall constellation to enable a revolution in weather forecast accuracy globally.”
Tomorrow.io has already been awarded more than US$20m in contracts from the US Department of Defense (DOD) and is partnering on a collaborative R&D agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
