Tomorrow.io and the firm’s two, 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.
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, five billion people live outside radar coverage with no radar-coverage over the oceans.
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 $20 million in contracts from the Department of Defense (DoD) and is partnering on a Collaborative R&D Agreement with 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.
“The precipitation measurements have already proven the overall system performance, providing significantly more insight into weather than existing satellite-based cloud-top imaging systems. With initial measurements completed, we are now in the process of growing the overall constellation to enable a revolution in weather forecast accuracy globally.” — John Springmann, Senior Vice President, Space & Sensors, Tomorrow.io