Environmental Information in Every Decision

Guiding vision statements are important, and define a future world we expect to interact with. Bill Gate's bold, yet simple goal, "a computer on every desk and in every home," gave Microsoft the broad scope to innovate.

Our vision is "Environmental Information in Every Decision."

In two decades, nearly-deployed constellations of US/European polar-orbiting and geosynchronous meteorological/environmental satellite systems will approach the end of their planned operational lifetimes. As the needs of weather services users continue to grow, they demand a broader suite of applied environmental services. Our ability to deliver these enhanced services is directly coupled to the pace and state of technology maturation. We look at several classes of decisions (public/private; corporate/ commercial; real-time/tactical/strategic) and how intersections of technology maturation and evolving societal needs can drive our concepts for exploitation of emerging technologies for, and data collected from, a future satellite observing systems generation.

We consider changing roles, uses, and applications of satellite observations, risks mitigated, and opportunities leveraged. Several case studies°Xwhere current data do not deliver required information content, better data would, but demand technology improvement°Xhighlight aspects of traditional and alternative/agile systems engineering methods: „h- Hyper-local weather forecasts and environmental predictions; and their role in°K „h- Disaster preparedness for sustainable communities, „h- Managing and mitigating threats to water security, and „h- Agriculture in a warming world.

The satellite value chain includes observation, data management, and exploitation. Next-generation systems will use technology advances as well as drive them. This will happen as users discover weaknesses in current data, want better data, and some technology gaps may be driven to closure where enhanced data requirements (e.g., automated data exploitation by the IoT) demand better performance than current technology can deliver. We identify key intersections between exponentially increasing technological maturities and evolving societal needs, at those singular points in time where requirements, architectures, and designs are frozen to define future development and operations.