Tomorrow.io Awarded NOAA Contract to Assess High-Revisit Microwave Sounder Data

by Tomorrow.io

June 18, 2026 · 7 min read

On June 18, 2026, NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service awarded Tomorrow.io a $7.3 million Commercial Data Program contract to provide passive microwave sounder observations from its satellite constellation as part of NOAA's Microwave Sounder Data Buy.

The award supports NOAA's assessment of commercial microwave sounder data, including data quality, forecast impact, operational readiness, and potential applications in tropical cyclone forecasting. The period of performance begins July 1, 2026 and runs through March 1, 2027.

NOAA described the data buy as focused on forecasting impact assessments, operational readiness, and preparation for potential transition to operations. For Tomorrow.io, the award marks an important step in NOAA's evaluation of a new commercial capability: high-revisit microwave sounding from an operational satellite constellation.

The Award

NOAA's Commercial Data Program assesses and acquires commercial satellite observations to evaluate how they may enhance the government's weather forecasting capabilities.

Under the contract, Tomorrow.io will deliver passive microwave sounder observations from its constellation for NOAA assessment, including studies related to forecast model impact and tropical cyclone forecasting.

Microwave sounding is considered the highest impact observation for global weather prediction models. Tomorrow.io's breakthrough is making that capability more frequent, scalable, and commercially available through an operational satellite constellation. Through this award, NOAA is evaluating how sustained, high-revisit microwave sounding from Tomorrow.io's constellation can complement existing observing systems and support the future of operational forecasting.

Official Announcement · NOAA / NESDIS

NOAA/NESDIS Awards a Commercial Microwave Sounder Data Buy

On June 18, 2026, NOAA awarded Commercial Data Program contracts to procure passive microwave sounder data and assess its impact on NOAA forecast models and tropical cyclone forecasting.

nesdis.noaa.govRead the announcement

The Blind Spot Over the Ocean

Most of Earth is ocean, and that is where the world's most dangerous storms spend much of their lives. Hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones often form and intensify over open water, far from the observing networks that exist over land. Ground-based weather radar is powerful near coastlines, but its reach is limited: even the NEXRAD network in the United States extends only about 230 kilometers offshore.

Aircraft reconnaissance helps fill that gap, but only for a fraction of storms. The United States flies hurricane reconnaissance for storms that threaten its interests, and no other country routinely conducts this kind of mission. For most tropical cyclones, across most of their lifetimes, there are no reconnaissance planes and no ground radar watching them.

That leaves satellites. Because tropical cyclones spend so much of their lives over tropical and subtropical oceans, satellite observations are often the only source of information available to forecasters.

What Makes a Microwave Sounder Different

Not every satellite sees the atmosphere in the same way. Visible and infrared sensors, the instruments behind most familiar satellite imagery, observe the tops of clouds. They are essential, but they cannot fully reveal what is happening underneath.

Microwave sounders can see deeper into the storm. Microwave radiation passes through cloud cover that is opaque to infrared sensors, allowing the instrument to measure temperature and humidity through the atmosphere, from near the surface to the upper levels, in both clear and cloudy conditions.

That distinction has direct forecasting consequences. In a 2019 technical study, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts noted:

“…infrared observations are more strongly affected by clouds and do not provide information below clouds, while microwave's wider geophysical sampling is a particular advantage.” — ECMWF Technical Memorandum 839 (2019)

This matters because cloudy regions are often where forecast errors grow.

Microwave sounders are especially important for estimating storm intensity. A tropical cyclone is a warm-core system: the stronger the warm anomaly near its center, the stronger the storm. Microwave measurements can help detect that warm core, and techniques for estimating central pressure from upper-atmosphere microwave observations have been used operationally by the National Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

Not a forecast — a cross-section. Four levels of the atmosphere over Tropical Cyclone Jangmi, retrieved from a single pass over the Philippine Sea and stacked the way the atmosphere actually is: a warm heart up top, dry air wrapping in, the moist inflow that feeds it, and at the surface, the eye and its engine room.

250 hPa · T

The warm heart

A warm core, ~12°C above its surroundings

The upper-level warm core is the physics that pulls surface pressure down. Warmer and tighter means a stronger storm.

+12°Cwarmer than the air around it

500 hPa · Qv

The threat

Dry air wrapping in at mid-levels

A moist eye encircled by intrusions of dry air. Dry air starves the convection — an early sign of weakening.

1 → 5 g/kgdry-to-moist contrast across the core

850 hPa · Qv

The fuel

Rich, moist inflow near the surface

A clean spiral of humid air drawn toward the center — the low-level moisture that feeds the storm.

~18 g/kgwater vapor in the moistest inflow

surface · rain + SLP

The engine room

The eye, the eyewall & the pressure well

A clean eye ringed by the heaviest rain, nested inside tightening pressure contours.

988 hPacentral pressure · eyewall rain in tens of mm/hr

A Different Kind of Microwave Sounding System

Microwave sounders have flown successfully on government weather satellites for decades. What makes Tomorrow.io's system different is not the observation type itself, but the architecture used to collect it.

Tomorrow.io currently operates the world's only constellation of microwave sounding satellites. While several organizations have demonstrated microwave sounding technology on individual spacecraft, Tomorrow.io is the only provider delivering a production-grade, high-revisit microwave sounding data stream from multiple operational satellites in orbit.

That constellation architecture is the core of the capability NOAA is now assessing. By increasing the frequency of observations, a constellation can provide more timely information about rapidly evolving weather systems, including tropical cyclones developing far from conventional observing networks.

Why Revisit Rate Matters

Microwave observations are valuable on their own. Their value increases when they are collected more frequently.

Traditional government weather satellites are extraordinary instruments, but there are relatively few of them. A developing storm may be observed only once or twice a day. In the life of a tropical cyclone, multiple hours is a long time. Rapid intensification can happen in just a few hours, leaving forecasters without a clear view of the structural changes taking place between satellite passes.

The Tomorrow.io constellation offers a path to more frequent observations, with an approximately sixty-minute revisit rate today across eleven microwave sounders in active orbit. That higher temporal frequency is especially relevant for storms over the ocean, where conventional observations are limited and conditions can change quickly.

Why Forecast Centers Value Microwave Sounding

The importance of microwave sounding is reflected in how the world's leading forecast centers evaluate their own systems.

ECMWF, widely regarded as operating one of the world's most skillful global forecast models, routinely measures which observations contribute most to forecast accuracy. In its 2023 assessment, microwave radiances ranked among the highest-impact observation types, described alongside conventional observations as “the main drivers of headline scores.”

The clearest evidence comes from denial experiments, where specific data types are removed from the forecast system:

A 2025 ECMWF study found that withholding microwave radiances caused more damage to tropical cyclone forecasts than removing any other observation type, degrading storm-position forecasts at every lead time and intensity forecasts out to three days.

Just as important, the system does not appear to be saturated. When ECMWF tested adding microwave sounders one at a time, it found large improvements from the first instrument and continued gains from each additional sounder. Even at the largest number tested, there was “no saturation apparent.” In other words, more microwave sounding continued to improve the forecast as additional observations were added.

A Shift in Weather Data Procurement

The award reflects the continued evolution of NOAA's Commercial Data Program and the broader Data-as-a-Service model enabled by the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017.

Under this approach, commercial providers develop, launch, and operate observation systems, while government agencies evaluate whether those observations can enhance forecasting and other mission applications.

Tomorrow.io builds and operates its satellites, manages the constellation, and develops the systems required to generate weather observations from space. Through this program, NOAA can assess the value of Tomorrow.io's observations and determine how commercial capabilities may complement existing government-owned observing systems.

This $7.3 million award represents NOAA's largest commercial microwave sounding data contract to date and an important milestone in the agency's evaluation of commercial atmospheric observations.

Microwave sounding is already one of the most valuable observation types in global weather prediction. The new capability is high-revisit microwave sounding from a commercial constellation. For hurricane forecasting, where rapidly changing storms often develop far from conventional observing networks, assessing that capability is a meaningful step forward.