The Grand Prairie Independent School District teamed up with Understory, a sensor and data analytics company, for a “Weather Is Cool” educational program that will help students learn about weather and atmospheric sciences and how they affect both the students and the environment. As part of the program, free weather sensors deployed at schools in Metro Dallas.
The Grand Prairie Independent School District teamed up with Understory, a sensor and data analytics company, for a “Weather Is Cool” educational program that will help students learn about weather and atmospheric sciences and how they affect both the students and the environment. As part of the program, free weather sensors deployed at schools in Metro Dallas. Currently, five GPISD schools have the Understory systems. The full deployment, when done, will be 14 schools in the district.
Mark Steger, responsible for the GPISD’s special projects and new construction said, “This is a great opportunity for the students at Grand Prairie Independent School District. We are thrilled to offer our students access to this cutting-edge data so they can better understand our local climate.”
Understory, Inc. CEO, Alex Kubicek explained the company’s reason for choosing Texas, specifically the Metro Dallas area. “Severe weather accounts for the majority of insured losses in the United States and has a profound impact on the economy. Dallas is one of the cities in the U.S. most prone to severe weather events such as tornados and hail storms. We hope that the deployment of our platform in the metro Dallas area will augment current systems to better predict and prepare for damaging weather.”
Understory systems are also on the ground in Metro Boston, Massachusetts and Kansas City, Missouri. The unique system is comprised of linked patent-pending sensors that feed “ground-truth weather data” directly to the Amazon Web Services cloud. So, what is ground-truth weather data?
Weather is typically predicted by collecting and analyzing data on atmospheric observations gathered by satellites or Doppler radar. The Understory technology, according to a news release, “detects rain, hail, wind and other weather events directly at the Earth’s surface, where the risk to life and property is greatest.” The company, founded in 2012, uses its ground-truth data to give clients real-time datasets, as well as graphical views of weather systems’ intensity and movement. This, in turn, increases early detection of risks.
Understory expects to help utilities, agriculture, insurance and other industries with its ground-truth-based weather data. The company stated that up to $485B of our nation’s economy shifts based on the weather.
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