TruWeather Solutions, a micro weather data and analytics company, and Spire Global, a global provider of space-based data and analytics, have signed a letter of commitment to support TruWeather’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant with NASA.
As part of the commitment, TruWeather will have access to Spire’s weather observational data sets and global predictions to fuel the TruFlite V360 micro-weather prediction models and hyper-local weather decision support APIs.
Spire will leverage TruWeather’s 35 years of aviation weather operations experience and unique positioning in the unmanned systems market, and most importantly, have access to TruWeather’s last mile weather solutions to address bespoke unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and advanced air mobility (AAM) weather needs.
TruWeather and Spire expect the relationship to result in a comprehensive and reliable end-to-end global weather service focused on increasing global awareness from the stratosphere to urban city building canyons for drones, air taxis and flight control and management systems and service providers.
TruWeather was recently awarded the NASA grant to develop an urban wind hazard service demonstration as part of NASA’s Weather Data Infrastructure initiative. The partnership’s precision micro weather analysis and urban predictions will contribute to decreasing operators’ flight pattern uncertainty and increasing their potential revenue, safety and utilization in urban areas.
Future reliability and predictability of drone and air taxi services will depend on better weather services to detect Venturi wind and wake turbulence effects, micro-burst detection, localized fog and cloud icing that pose significant risk to drone and air taxi operations.
Don Berchoff, CEO, TruWeather Solutions, said, “TruWeather is aligning sensor and data partners now to address the toughest weather challenge, localized urban wind variances and building induced wake turbulence, and micro-climate icing, and IFR conditions that are sub-grid to weather systems today and must get better for a safe, predictable and reliable drone and air taxi industries.”