The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) has awarded MIT Lincoln Laboratory a 2025 FLC Excellence in Technology Transfer Award. The award recognizes the laboratory's exceptional efforts in commercializing microwave sounders hosted on small satellites called CubeSats. The laboratory first developed the technology for NASA, demonstrating that such satellites could work in tandem to collect hurricane data more frequently than previously possible and significantly improve hurricane forecasts. The technology is now licensed to the company Tomorrow.io, which will launch a large constellation of the sounder-equipped satellites to enhance hurricane prediction and expand global weather coverage.
"This FLC award recognizes a technology with significant impact, one that could enhance hourly weather forecasting for aviation, logistics, agriculture, and emergency management, and highlights the laboratory's important role in bringing federally funded innovation to the commercial sector," says Asha Rajagopal, Lincoln Laboratory's chief technology transfer officer.
A nationwide network of more than 300 government laboratories, agencies, and research centers, the FLC helps facilitate the transfer of technologies out of federal labs and into the marketplace to benefit the U.S. economy, society, and national security.
Lincoln Laboratory originally proposed and demonstrated the technology for NASA's TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats) mission. For TROPICS, the laboratory put its microwave sounders on low-cost, commercially available CubeSats for the first time.
Of all the technology used for sensing hurricanes, microwave sounders provide the greatest improvement to forecasting models. From space, these instruments detect a range of microwave frequencies that penetrate clouds, allowing them to measure 3D temperature, humidity, and precipitation in a storm. State-of-the-art instruments are typically large (the size of a washing machine) and hosted aboard $2 billion polar-orbiting satellites, which collectively may revisit a storm every six hours. If sounders could be miniaturized, laboratory researchers imagined, then they could be put on small satellites and launched in large numbers, working together to revisit storms more often.
The TROPICS sounder is the size of a coffee cup. The laboratory team worked for several years to develop and demonstrate the technology that resulted in a miniaturized instrument, while maintaining performance on par with traditional sounders for the frequencies that provide the most useful tropical cyclone observations. By 2023, NASA launched a constellation of four TROPICS satellites, which have since collected rapidly refreshed data of many tropical storms.
Now, Tomorrow.io plans to increase that constellation to a global network of 18 satellites. The resulting high-rate observations — under an hour — are expected to improve weather forecasts, hurricane tracking, and early-warning systems.
"This partnership with Tomorrow.io expands the impact of the TROPICS mission. Tomorrow.io’s increased constellation size, software pipeline, and resilient business model enable it to support a number of commercial and government organizations. This transfer to industry has resulted in a self-sustaining national capability, one that is expected to help the economy and the government for years to come," says Tom Roy, who managed the transfer of the technology to Tomorrow.io.
The technology transfer spanned 18 months. Under a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), the laboratory team adapted the TROPICS payload to an updated satellite design and delivered to Tomorrow.io the first three units, two of which were launched in September 2024. The team also provided in-depth training to Tomorrow.io and seven industry partners who will build, test, launch, and operate the future full commercial constellation. The remaining satellites are expected to launch before the end of this year.
"With these microwave sounders, we can set a new standard in atmospheric data collection and prediction. This technology allows us to capture atmospheric data with exceptional accuracy, especially over oceans and remote areas where traditional observations are scarce," said Rei Goffer, co-founder of Tomorrow.io, in a press release announcing the September launches.
Tomorrow.io will use the sounder data as input into their weather forecasts, data products, and decision support tools available to their customers, who range from major airlines to governments. Tomorrow.io's nonprofit partner, TomorrowNow, also plans to use the data as input to its climate model for improving food security in Africa.
This technology is especially relevant as hurricanes and severe weather events continue to cause significant destruction. In 2024, the United States experienced a near-record 27 disaster events that each exceeded $1 billion in damage, resulting in a total cost of approximately $182.7 billion, and that caused the deaths of at least 568 people. Globally, these storm systems cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage each year.
“It has been great to see the Lincoln Laboratory, Tomorrow.io, and industry partner teams work together so effectively to rapidly incorporate the TROPICS technology and bring the new Tomorrow.io microwave sounder constellation online,” says Bill Blackwell, principal investigator of the NASA TROPICS mission and the CRADA with Tomorrow.io. “I expect that the improved revisit rate provided by the Tomorrow.io constellation will drive further improvements in hurricane forecasting performance over and above what has already been demonstrated by TROPICS.”
The team behind the transfer includes Tom Roy, Bill Blackwell, Steven Gillmer, Rebecca Keenan, Nick Zorn, and Mike DiLiberto of Lincoln Laboratory and Kai Lemay, Scott Williams, Emma Watson, and Jan Wicha of Tomorrow.io. Lincoln Laboratory will be honored among other winners of 2025 FLC Awards at the FLC National Meeting to be held virtually on May 13.
