This article was written by Jessica Borders and appeared in the Times West Virginian on October 27, 2010.

GST Lands Second NOAA Contract

Fairmont — Global Science & Technology Inc. is excited about the potential applications for its Mobile Platform Environmental Data system, which just received a second contract award.

In September 2009, GST won a $1.2 million contract from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service to create the Mobile Platform Environmental Data, or MoPED, system. Brian Bell, vice president of innovation for GST, explained that the objective was to create a multi-system prototype validating that mobile data taken off of commercial bus fleets could actually be used as part of the National Weather Service's weather forecasts.

GST successfully demonstrated that capability and recently received a second year of funding. On Sept. 1 of this year, NOAA awarded GST a contract that is worth more than $2.8 million and spans a period of 13 months.

Bell said GST is now working to evolve the prototype into the MoPED Initial Capability, or MoPED-IC, system, which is a more robust system where an increased amount of data can be accessed, processed and made available to the government. In the pilot project, GST had 32 mobile platforms, and that number will go up to more than 2,000 in this next phase. Also, the project will jump from 50,000 observations a day to close to 3 million.

"What this does is it enhances the National Weather Service's capabilities for providing additional or supplemental weather observations" to help make weather predictions more accurate, he said.

The weather decisions that the National Weather Service makes right now are based primarily on satellites, Doppler radar and weather stations. MoPED can be thought of as a mobile weather station that will fill the void where observations aren't currently being made, Bell said.

Looking at the bigger picture, GST hopes to eventually achieve a network in which many vehicles are interconnected and can actually share data and "talk" to each other, he said. This will in turn push the application to include road conditions for transportation, tracking carbon emissions for the environment, and detecting chemical and radioactive threats to communities and the nation through sensors.

"It's well beyond weather," Bell said. "We believe this will be the largest surface observation and surveillance network in the world."

From the initial inception of the project, GST was pleasantly surprised by the level of precision from the observations, he said. Rather than getting observations every few minutes like expected, they were coming every 10 seconds.

Bell said all the development on MoPED-IC is being done at GST's Innovation Laboratory, located in the Alan B. Mollohan Innovation Center in Fairmont's I-79 Technology Park. Bell said the Innovation Lab, which has proven to be a very productive space, "is the perfect environ¬ment" for this type of work.

Weather Telematics Inc. and ManTech International are GST's innovation partners on the MoPED-IC project, which is creating jobs. For the entire endeavor, as many as 10 people will be hired, with at least three or four specifically joining GST.

Weather Telematics has the sensing equipment that is actually put on the vehicles to collect the environmental data and helps GST understand what equipment to use. ManTech International, a prominent information technology company, is providing a high level of consulting and technical documentation, Bell said. He said GST hopes to start being able to commercialize MoPED outside of the government and provide a service to companies that need this type of observation.

"The support that we've received from public officials all the way down to the business community ... and some of our other partners has been wonderful," Bell said. "Those are the types of things that keep us going in terms of our innovation."

E-mail Jessica Borders at jborders@timeswv.com.