Physical Optics Corporation — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: SOCOM10-006

Description

To address NAVAIR’s requirement for a low life cycle cost maritime weather sensor system that collects and reports relevant data from the physical environment to provide detailed meteorological parameters in data-sparse environments for test and evaluation (T&E) ranges, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) will further develop the Maritime Weather Observing Sensor (MWOS) system, which modifies and enhances the SBIR-developed Micro Weather Sensor(TM) MWS(TM) for a maritime application The MWOS is based on a modified design that integrates enhanced, ruggedized weather sensor technology capable of achieving the World Meteorological Organization’s accuracy specifications for weather and cloud height measurements while quantifying sea state in a maritime environment. MWOS will integrate POC-developed components and existing commercial/modified off-the-shelf components into a modularized architecture adapted from POC’s expendable MWS, which is an ultra-low-power, battery-operated, fully self-contained, Iridium-SBD (short-burst data) connected, multi-parameter sensor that has been successfully deployed in more than 25 countries and adopted by the U.S. Navy for submarine-launched expendable MET sensing buoy operations. The ceilometer development will be leveraged from a previous SBIR Phase I Low Power Micro Ceilometer effort sponsored by the DOE, in which a lightweight, compact, low power consumption ceilometer prototype was designed and tested to report cloud layers above 20,000