GREENBELT, MD--(Marketwire) -- Global Science & Technology, Inc. is proud to announce its Mobile Platform Environmental Data (MoPED) System has been awarded a second-year contract from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—National Weather Service (NWS).
The next phase will transition the existing prototype into an initial capability system called MoPED Initial Capability or MoPED-IC. The MoPED-IC system will support nationwide observation data collected from commercial buses with the extended capability to include additional vehicles such as school buses, city transit buses, and trains. MoPED-IC will also target specific geographic areas of interest to NWS in order to sample areas at the neighborhood level outside of major transportation corridors.
In 2009, the GST team developed the MoPED prototype system that successfully collected data from commercial bus fleets as they traveled along bridges, highway inter-changes, mountain peaks, valleys and transportation corridors sensitive to weather and regional users. The acquired mobile observation data was then made accessible to the government's Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) via a data portal.
"The MoPED project was a great success," said GST Vice President of Innovation Brian Bell. "We were able to demonstrate and validate that environmental data collected from commercial buses traveling along interstate highways in the northeast U.S. can be used effectively for enhancing weather forecasts and prediction. Now, through MoPED-IC, our team will expand the capability to nation-wide geographic coverage and will employ additional types of vehicles to create the largest surface observation network in the world that will generate between three to five million observations per day. We will also begin assessing how the sensor platform and observation network can be used for other applications beyond weather such as transportation, national security, insurance, environment and energy."
MoPED-IC, valued at more than $2.8 million over a period of 13 months, will continue to be developed in GST's Innovation Laboratory located in the Alan B. Mollohan Innovation Center in Fairmont, WV.
The MoPED-IC Team is made up of two other companies who will perform various parts of the project. They are: Weather Telematics, Inc. and ManTech International.