Ashish Raval

Ashish Raval is the President of Synoptic Data, a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) focused on providing real-time observational weather data to enhance public safety, improve the productivity of government agencies and commercial entities, and assist in research and educational initiatives to advance the understanding of Earth systems. Mr. Raval is the Vice-Chair for HMEI and has been a Executive Council member since 2012. Mr. Raval is a Sr. Consultant with the World Bank and has also served as on the Advisory Borad of ETTAC for the US Govt. He holds MBA from Georgetown University MSEE from University of New Orleans.

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Presentation

Improving situational awareness by effective use of real-time earth observations

Official federal weather networks help provide consistent, valuable weather information to many areas across the United States. However, these are located primarily at airports or met offices and leave some significant gaps in sampled weather conditions. Weather observations have become much more abundant with the advent of low-cost weather stations and the proliferation of mesoscale observing networks (mesonets). Although the collection of all these disparate weather networks poses its own challenge, a unified regional digital platform for aggregating, processing and disseminating weather observations from hundreds of observing networks can greatly fill the gaps and provide greater granularity for precise weather forecasts.