Boston-based weather intelligence specialist Tomorrow.io has entered into a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with NOAA.
The partnership will analyze data from Tomorrow.io’s weather satellites to assess its impact on NOAA forecasts and evaluate its use in weather models. Tomorrow.io plans to launch its first satellites starting in late 2022, with a full constellation expected to be in orbit by 2024.
Tomorrow.io will conduct the CRADA activities with scientists from four of the five NOAA line offices: the National Weather Service; National Ocean Service; National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service; and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). Participating laboratories within OAR include the Physical Sciences Laboratory, Global Systems Laboratory, National Severe Storms Laboratory, and the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.
Radar provides vital observations of precipitation for weather forecasts, yet much of the world lacks ground-based radar coverage, with virtually no coverage across the oceans. Tomorrow.io’s weather satellites are expected to expand coverage significantly, revisiting each point on the globe as frequently as once every hour or less, compared with the two- to three-day revisit rate of existing spaceborne radar constellations.
Tomorrow.io’s work with NOAA is aligned with a broader initiative, Tomorrow.io’s Earth Science Research Collaborative. The goal of the initiative is to gather professionals in atmospheric science, meteorology and remote sensing to collaborate on scientific research projects, building new open-source tools for data assimilation, and working on operational forecasting applications. Initial members of the Collaborative include Dr Pavlos Kollias, professor of atmospheric sciences at Stony Brook University, New York, and Dr Alessandro Battaglia, associate professor at the Politecnico of Turin, Italy, both of whom will collaborate with Tomorrow.io on data validation and impact studies.
Thomas Cavett, vice president of strategy and operations at Tomorrow.io, said, “Tomorrow.io is proud to partner with distinguished NOAA scientists and other leading global academics in preparation for the launch of our constellation in order to advance numerous potential applications of our satellite data to Earth science, including numerical weather prediction, hydrological models, soil moisture and sea ice monitoring, among others.”
Tomorrow.io will offer Data as a Service to NOAA and other governmental agencies worldwide while ingesting its own data into a proprietary modeling suite that powers its Weather and Climate Security Platform.