SAN FRANCISCO – PlanetiQ won a $60 million contract to deliver each day weather data to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over five years.
It was PlanetiQ’s first sale of operational radio occultation data for numerical weather models. Up to now, Golden, Colorado-based PlanetiQ has delivered data to other government agencies for evaluation and testing.
“It is a very big deal for us,” PlanetiQ CEO Ira Scharf told “NOAA is clearly one in every of the most important buyers of weather data on the earth. It’s an incredible credibility boost. It shows the standard of our data, the reliability of our data and the impact that data can have on weather forecasting.”
PlanetiQ plans to determine a 20-satellite constellation. Two PlanetiQ satellites are in orbit and a 3rd is scheduled to launch later this yr. Several more” are on deck for 2024, Scharf said.
Bending Light
PlanetiQ’s satellites are equipped with receivers to choose up signals from the U.S. Global Positioning System, Russia’s Glonass, Europe’s Galileo and China’s Beidou global navigation satellite systems. Atmospheric density, which bends the angle of the GNSS signals, can reveal temperature, pressure, humidity and electron density within the signal’s path.
“Our state-of-the-art, next-generation radio occultation sensors, called Pyxis, are smaller, lighter and eat less power, but have nearly thrice the info collection capability than another system in operation today as we receive signals from all 4 world-wide GNSS constellations,” Rob Kursinski, PlanetiQ co-founder and chief scientist, said in a press release.
Scharf added that the PlanetiQ data will help NOAA “significantly improve short and medium-range weather forecasts, and supply essential insights to reinforce climate change research for the federal government, military and the private sector.”
“PlanetiQ is more than happy to be chosen by NOAA to support its global operational needs for GNSS-RO,” Chris McCormick, PlanetiQ co-founder and president, said in a press release. “We look ahead to launching more spacecraft in the following 18 months to expand our global coverage and determination to further support NOAA and international partners in weather forecasting and climate research.”
Slow and Regular Development
Founded in 2015, PlanetiQ has raised greater than $35 million thus far, including $18.7 million in 2019.
PlanetiQ established a radio occultation constellation after a few of its competitors like Spire Global and GeoOptics, but company officials say the time was well spent since their receivers produce high-quality data at low price.
Space Weather
Along with improving terrestrial weather forecasts, radio occultation data is helpful for understanding space weather.
NOAA awarded contracts last yr to GeoOptics, PlanetiQ and Spire to offer space weather data as a part of a pilot program to check the worth of the industrial observations.