US Air Force to buy WindBorne balloon data for SI weather forecasts under a contract worth up to $49 million
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
The military is buying data that makes SI weather forecasts more accurate.
According to TechCrunch, the contract is the largest in the history of the startup WindBorne Systems: the Air Force pays only for the data it orders for the regions and times it needs, and so far has ordered $1.7 million worth. About 700 autonomous balloons collect atmospheric sensor readings around the world; the company sells them to customers and feeds them into its own deep-learning weather forecasting model. According to the outlet, WindBorne is one of the first organisations to feed empirical data directly into such a model.
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