United States has agreed to spend $20M to deploy high tech Meteorological Satellites into Space

The United States plans to launch a swarm of tiny Satellites to close a crucial gap in the capacity to predict precipitation hazards, such as the deluge that flooded Northeastern towns in early September.The United States Air Force signed a roughly $20 million deal with Tomorrow.io on Thursday to build and deploy a complete network of tiny Satellites outfitted with sophisticated radar to detect precipitation from space.

Currently, among the more than 3,000 operational Satellites circling the Earth, just one is equipped with the capacity.”This is an issue,” a NASA official told the reporters. “It’s a big-money thing to undertake, and the agencies have been hesitant to do more so far.”

In February 2014, NASA and Japan’s equivalent, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, launched the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory satellite into space. The observatory, which costs almost a billion dollars and is about the size of a school bus, is capable of duties that no other satellite is capable of.The satellite also combines data collected by an existing collection of Satellites operated by an international collaboration.

This type of information is important for anticipating extreme weather occurrences. “We had no idea that between 8:50 and 9:50 p.m. yesterday night, the skies would actually open up and pour Niagara Falls level of water to the streets of New York,” stated New York Gov. Kathy Hochul following the tragedy. The more precipitation radars in space there are, the more precise the prediction on Earth will be.