Direct-from-satellite Radar Mappings Of Wind Over The Ocean For Improved Forecasts And Immediate Situational Awareness At Sea

Warfighters operating over the ocean increasingly need present and forecast weather conditions. Currently, observations and forecasts may miss the early formation of mesoscale and macroscale ocean weather events due to the limited sampling rate and long latency of satellite observations. Satellite radar scatterometers have more impact on forecast skill than measurements from any other platform except moored buoys. U.S. operators are currently dependent on foreign scatterometer observations which are limited to a twice-daily sampling rate. The high cost of current foreign and past U.S. scatterometers prevents their production in the quantities required to map global ocean winds more frequently. Care Weather Technologies, in partnership with Brigham Young University, is developing satellite scatterometers capable of measuring global ocean winds from a CubeSat platform at a small fraction of the price of current and past scatterometers. These scatterometers are affordable for commercial production in the quantities required to sample the global oceans on near-hourly timescales. In addition, Care Weather is developing direct-from-satellite data access capabilities to enable warfighters over the ocean to gain immediate access to currently-measured winds in their surrounding area.