Direct to Phase II Open Topic: Open Call for Innovative Defense-Related Dual-Purpose Technologies/Solutions with a Clear Air Force Stakeholder Need

Accurate weather forecasts are vital to air combat operations and essential for improving weather support for war fighters. During wartime the stakes are even higher and accurate forecasting can be a matter of life and death. Additionally, there is increasing global demand for accurate weather services as weather events are becoming more volatile, costly and harder to predict. The current military forecasting procedure uses manual collection of data and can take up to 45 minutes to complete when the data is accessible. In the event there is a data-contested environment this would make it impossible to produce a Mission Execution Forecast (MEF). Gathering and compiling the relevant environmental characteristics, applying the forecast, and then manually filling out spreadsheets is time and resource intensive, and potentially distracts or limits the airmen from focusing on more important aspects of the mission. A systematic, automated, and standardized process for tailoring weather products and forecasting mission-limiting meteorological parameters and providing decision quality environmental information for an operational end user is needed. Lexi is a web-based weather data aggregator and repository that can operate on multiple Air Force platforms at one-thousandth of the bandwidth current forecasting methods require.