Weather Radar New Zealand takes innovative rain monitoring research to NASA

Weather Radar NZ team

Weather Radar NZ is a small company making a big impact through its specialist weather and climate advice, monitoring and consultancy services. Over the last decade they have undertaken numerous projects for industry and government and have recently been given a grant through the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) to undertake research for NASA.

Co-founder and Director Luke Sutherland-Stacey has an interest in entrepreneurship that stemmed back to his university days at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. He was a two-time winner of the Velocity Ideas Challenge, delivered through the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), which he participated in as a doctoral candidate, pursuing a PhD in Physics. Luke credits his supervisor as being influential in showcasing how research can be entrepreneurial. “I was fortunate with my doctoral supervisor – he was quite keen on understanding end-users of science. At the inception of my PhD, he’d engaged with power generation company Mighty River Power. We put together a commercial proposal for them to use rain radar equipment that had been developed in the Physics Department and ran field observation in the Waikato for two years, contributing to their river modelling programme. The support both from industry and the University was quite formative in terms of setting up this idea that you can do interesting and novel science with things that are developed in a university setting, but rapidly transition to something that’s useful to industry and society.”

Luke ended up acquiring the radar equipment from the University and developing Weather Radar NZ through sweat equity. He says “Entrepreneurship can mean establishing a viable consultancy that delivers science and value for the community without chasing the unicorn aspiration. Even in doing that, you can arrive at really interesting projects. New Zealand has a rich and diverse ecosystem. If you look around you’ll see lots of Auckland grads doing interesting things at smaller scales that likely won’t become huge, but nonetheless, are important to Auckland or New Zealand.”

Weather Radar NZ was created to address a gap in the engineering space, specifically for water and wastewater networks. Luke says the concept of digital twins – working models of entire cities which can be used to understand how our urban environments operate and respond the hazards – is common now, but for years precursors to this with more limited computer modelling of individual urban systems have been in play. Quite soon after starting Weather Radar NZ, Luke was joined in the business by another University of Auckland alumnus, John Nicol. “John is an expert in radar technology and fortunately for me, after more than a decade abroad was looking for a different setting to academia. We’ve now spent years and years developing ground-based measurements for rainfall in Auckland to feed into those modelling applications.”

Auckland Council and Watercare have been core clients and partners for a wide range of projects, including the Safeswim website which Aucklanders rely on to see which beaches are safe to swim at. Luke says “It’s been a really neat collaboration. Auckland Council themselves decided to procure a science-based solution to a problem the community had identified as important and took responsibility for assembling the building blocks. There’s an ecosystem of science providers behind the Safeswim website including larger groups like the Danish Hydrological Institute and NIWA, and other smaller expert science providers like Puhoi Stour. Our contribution to the Safeswim project was to provide rainfall observations and forecasting information into each of those expert groups.”

NASA research partnership

Recently, Weather Radar were awarded one of the Catalyst grants from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE), created to support feasibility studies for NASA. Weather Radar NZ’s grant application highlighted how the extreme storms of 2023 underscored the need for enhanced rainfall observations in Aotearoa. While some regions have adequate radar and rain gauge coverage, others lack sufficient observations or access to real-time data from New Zealand’s weather authority, necessitating alternative approaches.

Luke says “Serendipitously, it turns out that through our years of preparing the technology and developing capabilities to address Auckland Council’s and Watercare’s local needs, we have inadvertently developed technology which addresses requirements that NASA have to unpack and reduce the error characteristics of their global space-based rainfall estimation systems.”

“NASA and their partners operate a fleet of satellites, attempting to estimate rainfall continuously everywhere on the Earth’s surface. But that process is challenging due to infrequent measurements. There’s been a huge tranche of research at NASA and their partners which seeks to understand those errors and typically that’s been done in the Northern Hemisphere because that’s where most of the ground-based observation platforms are, because that’s where most of the developed countries and hence science resources are concentrated. It means there’s been a gap in what’s supposed to be a global network, simply because there’s been very few people conducting such work in the Southern Hemisphere.”

That is until now. Weather Radar’s Catalyst study aims to establish the Auckland system as a validation site for NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) and future missions, initially using a rainfall archive extending back to 2010 to evaluate GPM products locally. Collaboration with NASA’s GPM team and local stakeholders will help identify and address deficiencies in satellite estimates. Part 2 of the project, if it goes ahead, will leverage data from novel profiling radars developed by Weather Radar NZ in earlier research projects to enhance global weather observation efforts.

The goal is that improved rainfall observations in Aotearoa would aid local planning and hazard management. Luke was at Wynyard Quarter at the time of the January 2023 floods that killed four people and wreaked havoc to people’s homes. Luke says “Physically experiencing that intensity of rainfall was profound and the terrible impacts highlight how people, particularly those who are vulnerable due to living in not ideal places because of their circumstances, really rely on society, science and government infrastructure to help ensure they can keep themselves safe and have the opportunity for an enjoyable life.”

New Zealand’s unique potential as a testing ground for innovation

Luke says “I think New Zealand is a great place to do innovative Applied Science for many reasons, but especially because it’s easy to access the end users. There’s only a few degrees of separation between people. I studied in Auckland and had jobs whilst I was at university in the engineering space, so it was quite easy to make connections to end users and come to understand their pain points. That’s a fundamental roadblock removed of not knowing who your customer is. I recommend to students who work for us that they use this opportunity to meet people in the community that we’re in service to.”

Luke also says New Zealand’s way of working is a strength. “The systems of how local government and industry are run here are very permissive to new ideas. You can pitch ideas at all levels and staff in our public institutions feel empowered to take ideas to their managers – innovation doesn’t have to be directed from the top.”

Return to University

Weather Radar have recently moved their offices to the University’s Newmarket campus. Based on Carlton Gore Road in the location that used to be Lion Breweries, the Newmarket Innovation Precinct is home to a wide range of research and development work and also provides co-location for a number of companies.

Luke says “Access to workshop space is really important for our equipment and sensor development aspirations. Universities like Auckland are really set up well for that, which is hard to replicate when you’re a small company. We’re also able to make use of the University’s Ardmore field site as a base for instruments for our NASA project and further collaborations with Auckland Council and Watercare. From our team of eight, seven are University of Auckland alumni and it’s great to be able to work with students. We have a summer scholarship student work with us every year.”