The U.S. Air Force conducts global operations that range from humanitarian support to campaigns against violent extremist organizations, often in austere and sometimes hostile locations with limited or non-existent surface-generated environmental information. Recent scientific and engineering advances in high-performance computing, numerical weather prediction and space-based remote sensing have fueled the growth of advanced global numeric weather prediction systems that are able to provide high resolution rapid-update forecasts for any location on the planet. Despite these tremendous advances enabling highly accurate, rapid-update weather forecasting and nowcasting, there exists an entirely unexplored trove of historically unused data that could enhance hyper-local weather predictions. Unique AF and DoD non-traditional data sources could be used to gather and feed a large swath of previously untapped environmental data relevant to weather nowcasting. EarthCast Technologies (ECT) is an industry pioneer in this field and provides highly detailed, real-time environmental intelligence and nowcasts to in-flight commercial aircraft and other weather consumers who provide their own non-traditional data sources for inclusion into custom nowcast products. ECT is uniquely qualified to analyze and incorporate satellite provided, non-traditional data sources into operational advanced weather modeling to create high-resolution, rapid refresh nowcasts in support of real-time battle management in data-sparse locations.
