Radar is used to power real-time situational awareness, short-term nowcasts, medium-term forecasts, and climate studies. Radar is often the critical sensor that drives weather forecasts, providing detailed information about precipitation and cloud structure that no other sensor can see.

Deploying radar on the ground to close this gap would be practically impossible – we can’t cover the oceans, and it’ll be very difficult to get to remote regions and vast land areas such as those in Africa, Latin America, and SE Asia. It’s been about 70 years since the first weather radar was invented, and we still haven’t been able to cover but a fraction of the globe. See this map from the World Meteorological Organization for more details.

Roughly 5 billion – most of the population of South and Central America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Even in the United States, there are still many regions with limited or no radar coverage.