Novel Nanosat Payloads for Naval Weather Needs

Ocean surface winds are critically important in naval operations. They may aid, hinder, or negate maneuvers and operations, and are a primary consideration in routing ships. Ocean transits are not conducted without taking climatic, current, and forecast sea conditions into consideration. Continuous and reliable information on favorable and unfavorable sea state is critical for a broad range of naval missions, including strategic ship movement and positioning, aircraft carrier operations, aircraft deployment, effective weapons use, underway replenishment, and littoral operations. Wind measurements are also used to support short-term weather forecasting (e.g. as inputs for the Navy Global Environmental Model (NAVGEM)) and predictions of weather warnings. Wind-generated waves drive the sea state and in severe weather conditions can hamper naval operations and in extreme cases can pose a threat to warfighter’s safety of life at sea. This proposal outlines our research plan for developing a novel low size, weight, and power (SWaP) GPS receiver and associated signal processing algorithms to support the Navy’s needs for Meteorological and Oceanographic measurement and data collection. The goal of the proposed Phase I effort is to determine the feasibility of developing a small-SWaP GPS receiver to measure ocean surface wind speed from CubeSat platforms.