Rain today? DIU, Air Force partner on global weather sensing

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s commercial innovation arm and the Air Force are jointly developing novel systems to improve global weather sensing from land-, air- and space-based platforms — today announcing prototype contract awards to five vendors for everything from nano-drones to large balloons to satellites.

The Defense Department “will use the commercial data for weather forecasting, impact applications, and climate change assessments. In this prototype, DoD is prioritizing solutions that provide data from outside the continental United States,” the announcement explains.

Weather is a major, if easy to overlook, factor in US military planning, one that is becoming even more critical as climate change threatens operations in many areas of the world. But accurate, timely and — perhaps most importantly — hyper-localized information about weather conditions outside of the US and Europe can be surprisingly difficult to obtain. Meanwhile, DoD’s long-running effort to replace its dying Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) weather satellites remains several years away from fruition.

Thus, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) Weather Systems Branch are eyeing commercial providers to fill the gap.

“High resolution (spatial and temporal) global weather data is more readily accessible from commercial platforms, and is increasingly important for making well-informed decisions in geographically diverse environments around the world,” the announcement states.

Though the announcement is new, the contracts were awarded a few weeks ago, a DIU spokesperson said, under a new pilot project with AFLCMC’s Program Executive Office Digital, whereby the Air Force is using DIU’s unique Commercial Solutions Opening’s (CSO’s) contracting process and techniques.

DoD in May sought out potential commercial providers of technology to improve “global environmental situational awareness and analysis, performance of global and regional weather physics-based models, and performance of global machine learning (ML)-based models,” the announcement notes.

“Solutions within DIU’s Global Weather Sensing project include satellite constellations with remote sensing technology, ground-based commercial networks with specific weather parameter sensing and/or leveraging Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology, and airborne commercial platforms that actively or passively sense weather parameters,” the announcement elaborates.

Data collected will be use for simulation experiment to improve the Air Force’s weather modeling capabilities, and perhaps to inform current weather-related ML efforts. Therefore, data sources and interfaces developed for the prototypes will need to be compatible with the USAF’s Weather Virtual Private Cloud.

The five winning companies are:

• Greensight – Greensight’s WeatherHive uses nano-sized drones to directly measure atmospheric conditions.
• Muon Space – designs, builds, and operates small satellites and scientific instruments to monitor climate change.
• NextGen Federal Systems – NextGen Federal Systems, will develop the Market Environmental Data for Intelligent Applications (MEDIA) prototype to curate commercially offered weather data and develop machine learning workflows and models.
• Tomorrow.io – Tomorrow.io will develop and use microwave (MW) radiometer sensing technology on small satellites in low Earth orbit to assess weather in Earth’s atmosphere. The company in September 2021 was awarded another Air Force contract to help build its constellation and link its data into the Weather Virtual Private Cloud.
• Windborne Systems – WindBorne designs, builds, and operates a constellation of long-duration smart weather balloons providing global in-situ weather observations.

The DIU-AFLCMC announcement provides no values for the awards.