Space pioneers? Perhaps, but we’ll leave that to the history books.
A once-in-a-lifetime technological advancement improving weather forecasting for every person and business on the planet? Definitely.
Today, we are extremely excited to announce our most exciting project to date: Operation Tomorrow Space.
TLDR: We are building the first-of-its-kind proprietary satellites equipped with radar, and launching them into space to improve weather forecasting technology.
Here are the details of Operation Tomorrow Space:
- Radar is used to power weather forecasts.
- Radar is a critical sensor to drive weather forecasts – it provides detailed information about precipitation and cloud structure that no other sensor can see.
- More than 70 years after radar was invented, over 5 billion people still live outside of radar coverage, making even the most basic forecasts a dream for the vast majority of humanity.
- Even in the United States, there are still many regions with limited or no radar coverage.
- Deploying radar on the ground to close this gap would be practically impossible – making it difficult to cover oceans, remote regions and vast land areas such as in Africa, Latin America, and SE Asia.
- So, we’re left with satellites.
- Current instruments on weather satellites provide some information about the state of the atmosphere, but are still limited in their ability to penetrate clouds and provide accurate information about severe storms and even moderate weather events.
- While this problem was identified long ago, and for the last few decades NASA has been working on space-based radars (TRMM, GPM missions), these satellites come at a price tag of roughly $1B each and provide revisit times in the order of every 3 days for every point on earth.
- Such limited revisit time is of no use to operational forecasting models – they need data with constant updates. In order to get more frequent scans, we need many – not one – satellites in low earth orbit (LEO). To enable that, we need to get the price down from $1B to a few million.
- This was considered impossible, until now
- Enter Tomorrow.io’s radar satellite. It offers comparable performance to the $1B radar satellites such as GPM, but at a fraction of the price, enabling a constellation of dozens of satellites and revisit time increase of 50X or more.
- The existing satellites in space are about to be retired, and they’re HUGE In size and the cost is in the billions. We’ve built our own satellite, included a radar, and made it the size of a mini-fridge.
- We’re launching a constellation of satellites to improve weather forecasting for the entire world. Consumers, businesses, third world countries, big energy companies in the US….and much more.
- We expect the satellites to be operational in 2022.
How did we arrive here?
Since the inception of Tomorrow.io (formerly Tomorrow.io), you’ve heard us talk about how weather technology historically has been led and provided by governmental agencies. How most weather companies just repackage this data and offer a service-based meteorologist business model. There has been a significant void of proprietary technology and software.
The result is that most countries – and the people and businesses in those countries – are blind to weather data. Repackaged governmental forecasts lack accuracy, resolution, and have limited coverage. Additionally, public agencies cannot overcome the multi-vertical complexity of weather impact, meaning they cannot build one software platform that both Delta and Uber can use…which is why they provide services (meteorologists) and not scalable software.
As a global society, we are reactive to weather events, and cannot link weather data to expected impact. Whether it’s the impact of day-to-day precipitation, snow, air quality, or events such as hurricanes and wildfires, we desperately need a dramatically better early warning and action solution at a hyperlocal and operational level ASAP. This is why Tomorrow.io is pioneering Operation Tomorrow Space.
Launching “Operation Tomorrow Space”
Tomorrow.io, which is a software company (SaaS), is aspiring to become the largest weather enterprise in the world. We started with proprietary sensing and modeling to predict the weather more accurately at every point in the world and built on top of it one software platform that can be configured to every job and vertical. We provide more than weather: Insights – meaning what the impact of forecasted weather will be and what is the recommended action in advance of that weather. Our customers include Uber, Delta, Ford, National Grid, and more.
Now, we are evolving into a SaaS company powered by Space: We’re launching a constellation of satellites to improve weather forecasting for the entire world. For the first time, a constellation of active radar will surround Earth and provide real-time observations to feed weather forecasting at every point on the globe.
The results will be improved accuracy of hurricane forecasting, disaster alerts, and more, as well as equal weather data in developing and developed countries.
We are so excited to be leading this project. Space offers new capabilities most of us thought would not be a reality in our lifetime. Operation Tomorrow Space brings us new hope, new opportunities, and we’re just months away.
Be well, stay safe, and thank you for taking the time.
Shimon
Co-Founder and CEO of Tomorrow.io
P.S. – DON’T FORGET TO REGISTER FOR CLIMACON NOW!
