MADISON, Wis.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Understory, the weather network and analytics company, today announced its partnership with University of Massachusetts Amherst and Colorado State University, lead institutions for the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA). CASA’s City Warn™ project is funded by the National Science Foundation and has created a “Living Lab for Severe Weather Warning Systems in North Central Texas.” By contributing on-the-ground insights from its sensor network, Understory is providing critical data in Texas to close weather observation gaps in real-time to support more accurate forecasting and facilitate quicker resource allocation in the case of a severe weather event.
“Understory is able to contribute AI-driven proprietary data to CASA’s pilot project, which seeks to revolutionize the human ability to observe, understand, predict and respond to hazardous weather,” said Alex Kubicek, CEO of Understory. “Our in-situ station measurements, in conjunction with more traditional, radar-based networks create a holistic picture of weather as it unfolds, enabling first responders and emergency managers to make quicker decisions.”
“Our goal is to a provide a complete and ongoing weather picture utilizing different types of information from individual sensors to coordinated networks, radars to barometers,” said Brenda Philips, CASA’s Co-Director, UMass Amherst. “In this program, we are bringing together environmental data providers with local community users in a public-private partnership model to close weather observation gaps and drive more efficient and effective responses to weather events.”
“Having access to hail data from the Understory sensors helps us to validate measurements made by our gap-filling X-band CASA radars, and to create better hail forecasting algorithms,” said Prof. V. Chandrasekar, lead scientist from Colorado State University, a partnering academic institution. Other participants of the pilot include the National Weather Service and the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), DFW Emergency Managers and Public Safety Officials.
To learn more about the project, please visit: http://www.casa.umass.edu/.
For further information about Understory, please visit: http://understoryweather.com/.
About Understory
Understory analyzes and processes the data it collects to create real-time datasets, views, and actionable information from historical, current, and forecasted weather events to provide better insight and early detection of risks. Understory’s composite of granular weather data has applications across a variety of markets, including broadcasting, agriculture, forecasting, and risk mitigation. For more information, visit www.understoryweather.com.
About the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere Program (CASA)
CASA is a multi-sector partnership among academia, industry and government dedicated to engineering revolutionary weather-sensing networks. These innovative networks will save lives and property by detecting the region of the lower atmosphere currently below conventional radar range - mapping storms, winds, rain, temperature, humidity, and the flow of airborne hazards. Established in 2003 as a prestigious National Science Foundation Engineering Center with over $40 million in federal, university, industry and state funding, the Center brings together a multidisciplinary group of engineers, computer scientists, meteorologists, sociologists, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as industry and government partners to conduct fundamental research, develop enabling technology, and deploy prototype engineering systems based on a new paradigm: Distributed Collaborative Adaptive Sensing (DCAS) networks. Since 2010, the work of CASA has been supported by the Jerome M. Paros Fund for Measurement and Environmental Sciences Research. For more information, visit http://www.casa.umass.edu.
