by Karen Dubey How PlanetiQ is Transforming Weather Forecasting Understanding Radio Occultation GNSS radio occultation (RO) is a satellite-based technique that turns navigation signals into atmospheric measurements. Signals... read more →
PlanetiQ supports the missions of U.S. government agencies and defense partners with a growing constellation of satellites delivering neutral atmosphere and ionosphere GNSS-RO data, RF sensing capabilities, and other space-based data products that strengthen national security, operational readiness, and public safety.
Weather Forecasting & Atmospheric Research: PlanetiQ has the highest-quality Signal-to-Noise Ratio GNSS-RO available, enabling more precise weather forecasting and atmospheric research that saves lives and benefits the environment and economy.
NOAA Partnership: In September 2025, NOAA awarded PlanetiQ a $24.3 million contract under the Commercial Data Program's Radio Occultation Data Buy 2 (RODB-2), representing NOAA's single largest commercial satellite weather data purchase to date.
Defense & Military Partners: PlanetiQ provides proprietary global GNSS-RO data to the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Space Force and other partners to enhance operations and mission success.
RF Sensing & Signal Intelligence: PlanetiQ's satellite constellation also supports the detection and geolocation of GNSS jamming, spoofing, and other signal interference, giving defense and government customers greater situational awareness in contested environments. See the RF Intelligence section below for more details.
Wind Energy: GNSS-RO data provides high-resolution atmospheric profiles, including temperature, enabling more accurate forecasts of wind speed/direction, and ultimately, turbine output. This helps optimize operations, predict power generation, and guide power trading decisions.
Solar Energy: GNSS-RO data improves surface solar irradiance forecasts by improving weather forecasts that predict key conditions such as cloud cover and temperature, allowing for better integration with other energy sources and more efficient power grid management.
Power Grid Optimization: Accurate forecasts of wind and solar generation support smarter resource allocation and optimized energy dispatch, boosting overall power grid efficiency.
Energy Demand Forecasting: Temperature is one of the strongest drivers of electricity demand. GNSS-RO data improves temperature forecasts, helping utilities anticipate heating and cooling load, plan generation capacity, and reduce the risk of costly supply-demand imbalances. Freeze events have also shown to be a disruptor to the power grid.
Grid Resilience & Severe Weather: GNSS-RO data enhances forecasting of severe weather events, including storms, hurricanes, as well as extreme cold and heat, that threaten transmission lines, substations, and other grid infrastructure. Earlier and more accurate warnings give utilities more time to prepare, harden infrastructure, and reduce outage risk.
Offshore Wind & Energy Operations: For offshore wind farms and other operations exposed to marine conditions, GNSS-RO data improves forecasts of lower tropospheric conditions, supporting safer operations and more reliable planning around weather-dependent maintenance and logistics.
High-Resolution Profiles: GNSS-RO delivers precise vertical profiles of temperature, pressure, and humidity, which are especially valuable over data-sparse regions like oceans.
Reduced Turbulence and Wind Shear Errors: More accurate atmospheric data from GNSS-RO lowers prediction errors, helping pilots adjust flight paths and avoid hazardous conditions.
Optimized Flight Routes: Improved forecasts enable airlines to plan more efficient routes, cutting fuel use and flight times.
Upper-Atmosphere Forecasting: GNSS-RO data provides detailed insight into upper-atmosphere conditions, improving forecasts, and enabling airlines to plan more efficient routes.
Better Departure & Arrival Planning: More accurate short-term weather forecasts support better decision-making around delays, diversions, and ground operations, reducing cascading disruptions across an airline's network.
Enhanced Safety in Data-Sparse Regions: Because GNSS-RO data doesn't depend on ground-based sensors, it fills critical atmospheric data gaps over oceans and remote areas, regions where traditional weather observations are limited, giving pilots and dispatchers a clearer picture of conditions along transoceanic and polar routes.
Enhanced Market Responsiveness: Real-time GNSS-RO data enables traders to react quickly to weather-driven market fluctuations.
Optimized Trading Strategies: Accurate forecasts support better decisions in weather-sensitive commodities such as energy and agriculture.
Improved Risk Management: More reliable long-range forecasts help traders and risk managers anticipate supply disruptions from droughts, floods, and severe storms, supporting better hedging and pricing decisions.
Regional and Global Data: GNSS-RO provides worldwide coverage, including regions lacking traditional weather observations.
Reduced Uncertainty: More accurate forecasts help farmers plan and reduce risks from extreme weather events.
Precision Planting & Harvest Timing: Improved short- and medium-range forecasts help growers make better decisions about planting windows, irrigation scheduling, and harvest timing, reducing weather-related crop loss.
Drought & Flood Monitoring: By improving forecasts of precipitation and atmospheric moisture, GNSS-RO data supports earlier identification of drought conditions and flood risk, giving farmers and agricultural planners more time to respond.
Accurate Risk Profiling: Precise forecasts help insurers better assess risks from natural disasters and weather-related events.
Optimized Underwriting: GNSS-RO data improves underwriting by refining risk estimates and premiums, supported by PlanetiQ's extensive historical records.
Parametric Insurance: GNSS-RO enables payouts based on predefined regional weather thresholds, streamlining parametric insurance policies.
Catastrophe Modeling: GNSS-RO data strengthens catastrophe models by improving the atmospheric inputs used to simulate hurricanes, severe storms, and other extreme weather events, leading to more reliable loss estimates.
Claims Verification: Historical GNSS-RO data can help insurers verify weather conditions at the time and location of a claim, supporting faster, more accurate claims assessment and reduced fraud risk. This same approach extends to spoofing-based theft claims, helping verify GNSS interference at the time of loss, as well as underwriting risk scoring by corridor for routes with elevated jamming or spoofing exposure.
Optimized Energy Distribution: Accurate forecasts help utilities anticipate demand shifts, optimize networks, and prevent weather-related disruptions.
Reduced Outages: Better awareness of upcoming events allows proactive resource management, lowering outage risks and shortening interruptions.
Infrastructure Planning: GNSS-RO data informs long-term planning by showing how climate change may impact weather patterns and extreme events.
Storm Preparedness & Crew Deployment: More accurate severe weather forecasts give utilities more lead time to pre-position repair crews, equipment, and mutual aid resources ahead of storms, reducing restoration times when outages do occur.
Water Utilities & Resource Management: GNSS-RO data also supports water utilities by improving precipitation and drought forecasts, helping with reservoir management, flood preparedness, and long-term water supply planning.
Optimized Shipping Routes: GNSS-RO data helps avoid hazardous weather, reduce delays, and improve fuel efficiency.
Dynamic Route Adjustments: Real-time insights enable shipping companies to adjust routes and keep deliveries on schedule.
Storm & Extreme Weather Avoidance: Improved forecasts over open ocean, where traditional weather data is limited, help vessels avoid tropical storms and other hazardous conditions that threaten crew safety and cargo integrity.
Port Operations & Scheduling: More accurate coastal and regional forecasts support better planning for port arrivals, departures, and cargo handling, reducing delays caused by weather-related disruptions.
Detecting and Geolocating GNSS Interference: PlanetiQ's satellite constellation and precision RF sensing capabilities give government agencies and commercial operators data to help identify and locate sources of GNSS jamming, spoofing, and other signal interference. By combining wide-area coverage with high-fidelity signal analysis, PlanetiQ helps customers build a clearer picture of where and how GNSS disruptions are occurring, supporting faster responses, more resilient navigation systems, and stronger protection of critical infrastructure that depends on accurate positioning, navigation, and timing.
Situational Awareness for Contested Environments: By continuously monitoring RF signals across wide areas, PlanetiQ helps defense and government customers maintain awareness of GNSS interference activity in contested or high-risk regions, supporting faster, more informed decision-making during operations.
Protecting Critical Infrastructure and Assets: GNSS-dependent systems such as power grids, telecommunications networks, financial systems, and fleet and logistics operations are vulnerable to disruption from jamming and spoofing. PlanetiQ's RF sensing capabilities help identify these threats early, giving operators the information needed to respond before disruptions cascade into larger failures. For construction, fleet, and logistics management, this data can detect spoofing-based asset theft, flag false coordinates for high-value jobsite equipment, minimize cargo theft via GPS misdirection, and highlight anomalies when trucks appear in unexpected locations.
Supporting Safer Navigation: For aviation, maritime, and other transportation sectors that rely on GNSS for safe operations, detecting and geolocating sources of interference helps operators avoid affected areas, maintain accurate positioning, and reduce the risk of navigation errors caused by spoofed or degraded signals.
Ionospheric Monitoring: GNSS-RO data reveals detailed ionospheric conditions, including electron density profiles, crucial for understanding space weather events that affect satellites and communication systems.
GPS & GNSS Signal Reliability: By tracking ionospheric disturbances, GNSS-RO data helps identify conditions that can degrade GNSS signal accuracy, supporting more reliable positioning, navigation, and timing for critical infrastructure and operations.
Communications & Radio Disruption: Space weather events, such as geomagnetic storms and solar flares, can disrupt HF radio and satellite communications. GNSS-RO data helps characterize these ionospheric disturbances.
Satellite Operations & Anomaly Awareness: Ionospheric and thermospheric variability driven by space weather can increase atmospheric drag and affect satellite orbits.
Space Weather Forecasting: As part of a growing satellite constellation, PlanetiQ's GNSS-RO data contributes to space weather models used by government agencies and research institutions to forecast geomagnetic storms and their downstream effects on power grids, aviation, and satellite systems.
Ira Scharf
Ira Scharf is Chief Executive Officer of PlanetiQ. Ira joined PlanetiQ in early 2023 and brings over 30 years of senior operating experience in enterprise weather solutions, artificial intelligence, cyber security and enterprise SaaS solutions. Most recently he was CEO and Founder of Spark Insights, an AI and geospatial analytics insurtech company founded in 2018 to deliver unparalleled global satellite and aerial-based insights to insurers and reinsurers for risk analysis, pricing and post-catastrophe damage assessment and response. Spark Insights was acquired by Concirrus Ltd in 2021.
Prior to that, Ira held numerous senior executive positions at major enterprise weather and cyber security firms, including Chief Operating Officer of Tomorrow.io, Chief Strategy Officer of BitSight Technologies and President, Commercial Services at AirDat (acquired by Panasonic).
Earlier in his career Ira spent eight years as Vice President and Division General Manager at The Weather Company (acquired by IBM) where he led the development of enterprise weather solutions for airlines, corporate and general aviation, energy utilities, wind and solar energy producers, agricultural entities, traders and hedge funds. He has been quoted in numerous business publications including BusinessWeek and The Economist.
Ira earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from MIT, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Chris McCormick
Chris McCormick, Founder of PlanetiQ, serves as President and Chairman of the company. He has more than three decades of experience in aerospace mission design, engineering, and leadership. At PlanetiQ, he directs the company’s mission to deliver the world’s highest-quality atmospheric and ionospheric data, driving innovation by assembling talented teams and advancing technologies to solve some of Earth’s most pressing remote sensing challenges for weather forecasting and related applications.
Before founding PlanetiQ, Chris established Broad Reach Engineering, where he served as CEO for 15 years. Under his leadership, the company pioneered the development of GPS Radio Occultation sensors for missions such as COSMIC, where Chris also served as Lead Systems Engineer. Following Broad Reach’s acquisition by Moog in 2012, he became Vice President of Moog’s Space Sector, overseeing more than $250 million in revenue and expanding operations internationally.
Chris previously held roles at Spectrum Astro, DARPA’s Space Applications program, and in multiple space and terrestrial sensing and communications initiatives. He earned his B.S. in Aerospace and Ocean Engineering from Virginia Tech.
Rob Kursinski
Dr. E. Robert Kursinski is Chief Scientist of PlanetiQ, where he leads the conceptualization and development of next-generation radio occultation and other remote sensing systems and their applications to improve our ability to observe, monitor, understand and predict weather, climate, and space weather.
Prior to PlanetiQ, he was Chief Scientist at Moog Broad Reach Engineering and previously served as Associate Professor of Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona, where he developed the prototype ATOMMS (Active Temperature, Ozone and Moisture Microwave Spectrometer) system. Earlier in his career, he was a Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, contributing to GPS radio occultation development and the Mars Atmosphere Climate Observatory mission.
Dr. Kursinski has authored numerous scientific publications and earned recognition for innovations in GPS occultation analysis and atmospheric remote sensing. He holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from USC and a Ph.D. in Planetary Science from Caltech.
Paul McGaugh
Paul McGaugh is Vice President of Hardware Engineering at PlanetiQ, where he leads the design and development of satellite electronics. With deep expertise in spacecraft component architecture, manufacturing, and testing, he guides technical teams in delivering reliable, cutting-edge hardware that advances PlanetiQ’s mission. His career reflects a passion for space technology and decades of hands-on experience solving the unique challenges of building electronics for orbit.
Before joining PlanetiQ, Paul was Associate Principal Engineer at Moog Space and Defense Group, where he honed his skills as both engineer and project manager. There, he contributed to the BRE440 system-on-a-chip and the SB-SAT communication terminal, both widely used in LEO spacecraft. Earlier, as a Senior Research Engineer at Southwest Research Institute, he designed single board computers for various missions, a solid state recorder for NASA’s IMAGE mission, FPGA circuitry for the PEPE instrument on Deep Space 1, and command and data handling boards for multiple satellites. He began his career at Honeywell Process Solutions, developing safety-critical control systems electronics, an experience that instilled a lasting focus on reliability.
Paul earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Lamar University. Inspired by the golden age of space exploration, he continues to push the boundaries of spacecraft electronics design.
Jonathan Brandmeyer
Jonathan Brandmeyer is Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at PlanetiQ, where he applies deep expertise in control systems, dynamic analysis, and state estimation to GNSS radio occultation. He has led the design and implementation of PlanetiQ’s GNSS signal acquisition system, tracking control loops, and precise orbit determination, as well as the world’s lowest-latency space weather data preprocessing pipeline. His work integrates advanced algorithms with large-scale computing to deliver operational accuracy and resilience.
Previously, Jonathan was an embedded software and controls engineer at Alphabet’s Titan Aerospace team and contributed to Google Geo, developing calibration and geolocation systems at global scale. He also headed Boulder Wind Power’s power electronics team, advancing silicon carbide turbine and grid-interactive power converters. Earlier in his career, he worked across embedded engineering projects in multiple industries. A former U.S. Navy Nuclear Propulsion Plant Supervisor, Jonathan holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University.
Donny Patullo
Donny Pattullo is Vice President of Business Development at PlanetiQ, where he leads the company’s expansion into commercial markets. He brings more than 20 years of experience in technical sales, weather products, marketing, and business development.
Before joining PlanetiQ in 2025, Donny spent five years at BeaconLive, where he directed sales, marketing, business development, and strategy for a niche SaaS business in the continuing education space. Earlier in his career, he held a series of leadership and business development roles across the weather and technology sectors, including positions at Tomorrow.io (formerly ClimaCell), Limelight Networks, IBM, The Weather Company, and WSI.
Donny earned a B.S. in Aeronautical Science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and holds a Commercial Pilot’s License with Instrument Rating. He lives in Massachusetts with his young family and enjoys boating, traveling, and often finding ways to combine the two.