Timothy Lang

Today we are revealing what DeepSky will carry. DeepSky is the world's first AI-native weather constellation, built as an early warning constellation. It will carry five instrument capabilities: - Precipitation radar from space, which reads a storm in three dimensions - Hyperspectral microwave sounding, which reads temperature and moisture through cloud - Infrared and visible imaging, which catches storm tops and fire signatures on every pass - GNSS radio occultation, which returns the sharpest vertical profile in orbit - GNSS reflectometry, which reads wind inside the rain These five were chosen because each one reads something the others do not. The sounder is the backbone: temperature and moisture through the whole column of air, through cloud, day and night, the observation a global forecast leans on most. The radar adds the structure of the rain itself: where it sits in the column, where it melts, how tall the storm has built. Occultation is the reference that anchors the rest of the satellite record, and it returns high-resolution vertical profiles of the atmosphere that sharpen everything else. The imager adds the picture: cloud tops, surface temperature, the hot spots that mark a fire. And in heavy rain, where the usual wind sensors are blinded, the reflectometer still reads the wind at the sea surface. All five fly on the same spacecraft, so every pass gathers those readings together, compounding our ability to observe the atmosphere, and so to predict it. More than five billion people live outside radar coverage. Over much of the Earth, on most days, nobody can say with confidence whether it rained yesterday. That is not a gap in the models. It is a gap in the record they learn from. DeepSky is being built today, while our eleven active microwave sounders keep flying as our Gen-1 fleet. Over the next few weeks we will breakdown each instrument in turn and show how the five work together as one system. Read the full story below: tomorrow.io/blog/deepsky-the…