Alongside NASA and JAXA, Tomorrow.io is the Only Other Organization to Ever Take Such Measurements from Space
August 24, 2023 – Tomorrow.io, a global leader in weather intelligence, announced today 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.Â
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, 5 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 & 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.”
As a commercially developed and privately funded enterprise, Tomorrow.io offers a revolutionary price-to-performance ratio enabled by private innovation. In contrast to government missions that have been limited by costs and single satellites, Tomorrow.io is building the de facto GPS network for weather, closing the decades-old gap in weather sensing from space.
Tomorrow.io has already been awarded more than $20M in contracts from the Department of Defense (DOD) and is partnering on a Collaborative R&D Agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
From farmers predicting crop yields to governments preparing for natural disasters, the benefits of the data provided by Tomorrow.io’s satellite constellation has the potential to be felt worldwide by every person, business, and government on Earth,