Naomi Cooper
The Defense Innovation Unit and the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center have awarded five companies prototype contracts to develop commercial weather sensing technologies.
The platforms will work to gather and integrate global weather sensing data from air, ground and space-based systems into the U.S. Air Force’s Weather Virtual Private Cloud to support environmental monitoring, situational awareness analysis and climate change assessments, DIU said Wednesday.
The awardees and their respective contributions to the pilot program are:
- Greensight – data from its WeatherHive atmospheric monitoring technology
- Muon Space – small satellites and associated scientific instruments
- NextGen Federal Systems – a machine learning and artificial intelligence-based prototype platform
- Tomorrow.io – microwave sounders from its low-Earth orbit satellite constellation
- Windborne Systems – a constellation of long-duration smart weather balloons for global in-situ weather observations.
DIU noted that weather data collected from the pilot project will be accessible for use in observing system simulation experiments funded by the government.
