Tomorrow.io’s R1 radar satellite.
Source: Tomorrow.io
Boston-based Tomorrow.io started out as a software company offering ultra-accurate street weather forecasts. Now it’s setting its sights on space.
The company recently launched Tomorrow-R1 on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which it claims is the world’s first commercially built weather radar satellite. There are very few atmospheric radars currently orbiting the Earth, all built by government agencies. There is one in the US, run by NASA.
Tomorrow.io uses proprietary software to not only predict, but also help companies plan for severe weather. It uses information from government radars, data satellites, weather stations, cellular signal fading, and even connected vehicles with wipers and temperature sensors — what its CEO and co-founder Shimon Elkabetz calls “the weather of things.”
However, the new radar satellites will provide a much wider range of data.
“We’re going to start a major revolution in weather forecasting and climate modeling, hopefully helping the National Hurricane Center make better hurricane forecasts, helping insurance companies insure farmers in India and Brazil, and helping airlines fly from JFK A safer route to London with less wasted fuel,” Elkabetz said.
There is a delay of three days or more in the information from the NASA radar satellites simply because of the distance and the frequency at which it passes the US local ground radar, which is what Americans usually see on the local news, which is not available everywhere. In fact, most of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, and many other places lack radar coverage. In addition, land-based radar does not cover specific mountainous regions of the United States, nor does it extend to the ocean. That makes it harder to get accurate storm forecasts for coastal areas.
Satellites can provide coverage to billions of people.
Elkabetz said the company intends to launch more than two dozen of its own satellites over the next two years. Combined with sensor microwave technology, this would create a “constellation” of weather monitoring systems that would sample every point on Earth nearly every hour, he said.
“We put radars that we designed and built ourselves on a dedicated satellite, and we combined many of those radars with another sensor microwave detector that was going to be installed on another satellite,” he explained. “Both The combination of the two will create a global real-time precipitation map covering essentially every point on Earth in near real-time.”
Major customers now include several airlines such as delta, Unityand JetBlue AirwaysIn a case study completed in 2021, JetBlue found that Tomorrow.io let it know when the storm had passed, helping it limit unnecessary delays and cancellations, saving its operations team as much as $50,000 per hub per month.
Other clients include Fox Sports, uber, Google cloud, amazon web services, Microsoftand the U.S. Air Force.
Tomorrow.io has been awarded more than $20 million in U.S. Department of Defense contracts and is executing a collaborative research and development agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to a press release.