Tom Yunck was a NASA researcher 20 years ago when he worked on developing sensors that monitor weather and climate change using the government’s Global Positioning System satellites.
The 58-year-old space scientist is now hanging up his lab coat at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to take the technology to market.
His company, GeoOptics LLC, composed of 40 scientists and investors, is in negotiations with five potential investors to commercialize what’s called GPS radio occultation technology.
Unlike traditional Earth-observation satellites that monitor storms and climate changes with images of atmospheric emissions, the GeoOptics’ system passes radio waves through the atmosphere to measure temperatures with unprecedented precision.
For example, pilot GPS satellites recently predicted the strength and path of a hurricane four days before it made landfall in South America. It was off by only 37 miles. Traditional GPS sensors can model a hurricane’s path three days beforehand and the measurements are typically off by about 186 miles, according to Yunck.
Data from a recent pilot study of this technology has proven so effective in improving weather forecasts that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in December named GPS radio occultation data as one of its top priorities for environmental data to be purchased from commercial suppliers.
This technology was hatched in a NASA laboratory and has long been validated by international weather researchers, although it was never fully deployed.
Why wouldn’t the government simply use its own technology rather than see it privatized? That’s because the new technology is cheaper, and government officials are reluctant to reduce funding for the old, expensive system, Yunck believes.
“The government doesn’t cancel big, expensive programs in favor of better, cheap programs. It’s political,” he said.
The big, expensive old program includes $12 billion environmental satellites and $8 billion weather satellites. The eight huge, bullet-proof satellites monitor the atmospheric contents of the Earth from orbit.
“The standard approach is to put up giant satellites and big sensors that last a decade. These are incredibly expensive,” said Rob Kursinski, professor of atmospheric sciences and planetary sciences at the University of Arizona. “The GPS approach is putting up a bunch of little relatively inexpensive satellites so that you get redundancy and reliability through numbers.”
GeoOptics would, in fact, use smaller, cheaper satellites worth about $2.5 million each. The startup cost of putting up a fleet of a dozen satellites would be $100 million, which would come from the investors.
Yunck estimates GeoOptics would then need about $40 million a year to keep the system running. He expects half of the expenditures to be coveed by subscriptions from government agencies such as NOAA and the rest from its counterparts around the world.
Yunck said he is in talks with five private aerospace and weather-sensing companies that are interested in the venture.
Pilot program
Lidia Cucurull, a scientist for University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and a special contractor to NOAA, has been working with a set of pilot GPS satellites. Unlike traditional Earth-observation satellites, she said, the GPS system isn’t affected by precipitation and remains accurate whether it monitors atmosphere over land or the ocean.
A side-by-side comparison of a five-day weather forecast derived from traditional sensors and GPS satellites shows that the location-based system provides weather data closest to reality, Cucurull said.
“We are only using six satellites and these are cheap instruments,” Cucurull said. “We are still getting significant benefits from them and the data is improving weather forecasts.”
Data from the GPS-based satellites together with the traditional Earth-observation satellites would create the most precise, comprehensive picture of the planet’s weather and climate. But when it became clear that the government would not fund the launching of the GPS satellites, Yunck decided to take the technology private.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It saves taxpayers money while allowing scientists to take charge of their agendas.”
The GPS radio occultation system is based upon what Yunck calls “basic physics” when a light or radio wave passes through any medium, it bends.
So as a radio wave passes through a cold, dense atmosphere, it bends more sharply than it does in a warmer, less dense atmosphere. The bending angle is measured by an atomic clock via the GPS system. That is how the GPS system can measure temperature with precision, time being the most accurately measurable physical quantity.
So far, the system can close in on the temperature of the Earth within 0.02 of a degree Celsius. The traditional observation system is typically off by 2 to 4 degrees Celsius.
