Robust Analytics continued its recent string of proposal successes when NASA selected us for developing a proof of concept for an urban microclimate weather system. When deployed, the weather station network would provide weather situational awareness throughout the route of flight over multiple and varied flight paths, with all the relevant weather information a pilot needs, doing so with automatic continuous weather reporting that is then digested in a form that provides need-to-know situational awareness and alerting for an urban flight planner.
The innovation is a networked weather information capability that is essential to flight in the urban environment, tailored to the urban environment, with the suitable level of timeliness and detail to allow urban flight dispatch. The concept is designed to be self-operating and self-powering, to enable the weather stations to be situated virtually anywhere and deliver networked information to a dispatcher at a local or distant location. Additionally, this concept begins to develop the precepts of urban weather forecasting, first by building a database of urban weather for mining, and by beginning to derive weather lessons from the collected data.