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Satnews Daily
March 20th, 2019

The First Weather Intelligence Forum at InterMET Asia 2019 to be Hosted by Orbital Micro Systems


Orbital Micro Systems (OMS will host the first Weather Intelligence Forum at InterMET Asia 2019, the world’s premier weather, flood, and air quality conference.

InterMET Asia is occurring from March 26 through 29, 2019, at the SunTec Convention Center in Singapore. The Weather Intelligence Forum will be presented March 28, 2019 as part of Asia Climate Week and InterMET Asia. The program brings together experts in the management, processing, and interpretation of weather data collected by satellites, terrestrial and airborne systems, and other sources, to discuss the current and near-term challenges facing weather information users such as MET offices, and industries including agriculture, insurance and reinsurance, aviation, and maritime transport.

In addition to participating in the Weather Intelligence Forum, William Hosack, CEO at OMS, will also deliver a plenary session address at InterMET Asia on Wednesday, March 27, at 11:30 a.m. In his remarks, he will discuss the challenges facing urban and regional entities in obtaining weather information with sufficient detail and temporal frequency to make timely and informed decisions regarding weather impacts and he noted that getting to the necessary level of detail is one challenge, but the bigger one will be managing the huge volume of raw data and quickly extracting useful and relevant information. Without this imperative, the information will likely remain unseen long after the weather event has done its damage.”

OMS has established the International Center for Earth Data (ICED) in Edinburgh, Scotland, to create an easily accessible marketplace for earth observation data which offers analytics-ready data on demand or via subscription — often within 15 minutes of collection. In addition, OMS is building a constellation of some 48 low-earth orbit satellites equipped with miniaturized passive microwave radiometers to gather temperature, precipitation, and moisture data at up to eight altitudes.

OMS is also participating in the launch of its first Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS) satellite on April 17, 2019, from Wallops Island, Virginia. When a full complement of GEMS satellites are on-orbit, the constellation will provide global weather observations at 15 minute intervals.

To register as a visitor to attend the free Weather Intelligence Forum at InterMET Asia 2019, please visit intermet19.reg.buzz/oms.

Executive Comments

Hosack said OMS is one of many commercial enterprises launching satellites to gather Earth Observation data in greater volumes and lower latencies. These companies will be adding vast amounts of data to large government-operated platform datasets, and we expect this influx of raw data entering the ecosystem will overwhelm the traditional data processing systems used today. The Weather Intelligence Forum is designed to bring the realities of ‘data overload’ to the forefront by involving data users and producers to build awareness and offer solutions to all participants in the ecosystem. InterMET Asia is the perfect venue for this discussion, since it attracts participants from every continent, as well as from MET offices in areas that have had limited satellite-based data and stand to benefit the most from the data generated by these new commercial satellite platforms.