CREARE LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: A16-047

Description

The objective of this project is to improve situational awareness of weather impacted terrain conditions in the battlespace. Our technical approach exploits crowd-sourced data available from existing sensors on mobile devices. Creare is developing these capabilities within the Crowd-Sourced Terrain Analysis for Geospatial Enterprise (CSTAGE) software framework. CSTAGE provides capabilities for measuring, staging, assimilating, and exploiting in-the-field environmental data available from available sensors on Soldier-worn mobile devices such as Nett Warrior. Under our Phase I effort, Creare proved technical feasibility by developing and demonstrating a full-featured prototype crowd-sourced geospatial enterprise software framework. During Phase II, we will build upon our Phase I results to refine and implement the CSTAGE software framework for deployment on representative mobile devices used by the Army, demonstrate crowd-sourced collection of weather-related and other data from these devices to populate a cloud-based geospatial data repository, implement physics-based and machine learning algorithms to derive enhanced environmental parameters from the crowd-sourced sensor data; generate high-resolution nowcasts and forecasts through data assimilation of crowd-sourced observations into numerical weather models, demonstrate the improved quality of the high-resolution nowcasts and forecasts relative to operational gridded weather data products, and deliver CSTAGE to the Army for technology demonstration and evaluation.