Leveraging Private-Sector Innovation in Weather Data Collection for Better Forecasts of High-Impact Events

Private-sector innovation in commercial weather satellites, sensors on commercial aircraft, drones, commercial surface-based networks, and crowd-sourced data via mobile phones and automobiles is transforming the world of environmental data collection in ways that were barely imagined when Hurricane Katrina made landfall a decade ago. The merging of these new data sources with increasing access to traditional data sources in the public domain and advances in high-performance computing, modeling and data mining will drive dramatically better forecasts and decision support services for high-impact weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, heavy rainfall and winter storms.