We’re very excited to share that we’ve been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to support research and development on HydroForecast Seasonal.
NOAA recently announced that they’ve awarded approximately $16 million in grants to 47 U.S. small businesses. This seed funding will support research and development of innovative technologies across NOAA’s mission. In NOAA's most recent SBIR Notice of Funding Opportunity, the agency stated, “Water challenges affect all economic sectors, from agriculture to utilities, and the impacts are escalating. There is a need for new observations and tools, as well as the use of more physically-based water modeling and fully coupled Earth system modeling approaches that leverage the rapid expansion of available data and technology.”
We’re proud to have been selected in the Phase 1 round. We recognize that climate change accelerates and exacerbates the challenge of ensuring a safe water supply, and that water managers planning on a seasonal timescale need help advancing models, tools, and transforming model results into actionable information for making decisions. During Phase 1, our team will focus on the following technical objectives:
1) Improve methodology and data used for generating seasonal weather forecast inputs.
2) Integrate a new seasonal weather forecasting source to improve accuracy at longer lead times.
3) Benchmark performance in critical basins that benefit customers and society.
“Accurate seasonal water supply forecasting is extremely challenging and significantly impacts our nation’s water, food, and energy security,” said Dr. Genevieve Lind, NOAA SBIR Program Manager. “We’re proud to support Upstream Tech’s innovative research to advance seasonal forecasting."
View the full list of awards from NOAA here. Learn more about HydroForecast Seasonal and other features here.
