NOAA has selected Tomorrow.io for the Multiple Award Space-Based Environmental Monitoring (SBEM) IDIQ, the vehicle NESDIS uses to acquire commercial satellite observations. Tomorrow.io was selected across multiple instruments on a contract that spans seven categories of space-based environmental data, runs for ten years, and operates under the ProTech 2.0 program with a shared $8 billion ceiling.
What SBEM Is
SBEM stands for Space-Based Environmental Monitoring. It is run by NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service under the ProTech 2.0 program, and it sits inside the NESDIS Commercial Data Program.
That program traces its authority to the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017, the same law that created the Earth Prediction Innovation Center. Congress wrote both into the same bill for a reason. One was aimed at how quickly good science reaches the operational model, the other at where the observations feeding that model come from. Nearly a decade on, both questions are still the ones that decide how good an American forecast can be.
SBEM is the mechanism for the second question. Its purpose is to move commercial observations from pilot into operations, giving NESDIS a standing way to buy commercial data at operational scale rather than one demonstration contract at a time. The vehicle spans seven functional categories of environmental data and runs for ten years.
The Problem SBEM Was Built to Solve
Microwave sounding carries more weight in a global forecast than any other class of satellite observation, and demand for it keeps rising as models get better at using it. At the same time much of the planet remains thinly observed. Over the oceans and across the tropics, the atmosphere can go hours between looks. NOAA’s approach is to expand the total capacity of the observing system rather than swap one source for another, adding commercial observations alongside its own satellites so the record gets denser and refreshes faster.
Collecting the data was never the hard part of that. The hard part is earning a place in an operational forecast.
A pilot proves data is useful. Operations means a forecaster depends on it, on a schedule, with a public warning resting on it, and with latency, calibration, continuity and accountability holding every day rather than on a good day. That bar is high for good reason, and clearing it is what separates an interesting dataset from one a warning can rest on.
Tomorrow.io’s microwave sounders have been through that evaluation. The company is the first commercial provider of operationally validated microwave sounder data, with Observing System Experiments run through NOAA’s Unified Forecast System and JEDI showing statistically significant forecast improvement. SBEM is the path that carries that work from validated to operational, and it does the same for the other instrument categories Tomorrow.io was selected for.
What Operations Actually Looks Like
The distinction stops being abstract when a warning center is making a call.
On July 31, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center was assessing the intensity of Super Typhoon Dolphin after its third eyewall replacement in three days, in 49-foot seas. The microwave imagery its reasoning cites came from one of Tomorrow.io’s sounders. Across Dolphin’s six-day evolution, the constellation roughly halved the wait between microwave looks at the storm.
That is what operational means. A forecaster carrying responsibility for a warning reached for the data at the moment the storm was hardest to read, and it was there. NOAA had awarded Tomorrow.io a contract in June to evaluate this data through the storm season, and SBEM is the vehicle that carries that kind of work forward.
A Hybrid Observing Architecture
NOAA is building an observing system that draws on government satellites and commercial ones together. NESDIS has been explicit that it now treats commercial observations as complementary to its own programs rather than supplementary to them.
Tomorrow.io is proud to support that architecture. Government systems provide the backbone, the long climate records, and the sovereign capability a country needs to own. Commercial systems can add density, refresh, and coverage in places the backbone was never built to reach. Neither replaces the other, and the forecast is better for having both.
“SBEM is where NOAA decides how commercial observations become something a forecaster can depend on,” said Thomas Cavett, VP of North American Federal at Tomorrow.io. “Building a satellite that takes a good measurement is only the first step. The harder one is meeting the standard an operational forecast holds you to every day: latency, calibration, continuity, and the accountability that comes with a public warning. NOAA is deliberately building an observing system that runs on government and commercial satellites together, and being selected across multiple instruments means we can support more than one part of it. That reflects years of work alongside NOAA, and a team that understands what operational forecasting actually demands.”
What Comes Next
Being on the vehicle is the start of the work rather than the end of it. Over the next ten years Tomorrow.io will compete for and deliver task orders under SBEM, meeting NOAA’s operational requirements for latency, quality, security and continuity.
Part of NOAA’s mission is the protection of life and property. Every observation that reaches a forecaster faster, or covers ground nothing was watching, serves that mission directly. That is the reason to do the work.
