A Marion man is working with a company that strives to predict far in advance up-to-the-minute forecasts of just the kind of weather the East Coast has been experiencing over the past month.

Data collected and instantly analyzed from satellites circling the earth can provide environmental forecasts for communities, businesses, governments and travel industries all over the world.

Mike Edwards, who with his wife, Susan, owns and operates The Collins House Inn Bed & Breakfast, and who also serves on the Smyth-Wythe airport commission, is vice president of business operations for EarthCast Technologies (ECT) headquartered in Asheville, N.C.

The foundation of ECT, states the company, is being able to understand weather and the Earth system and process the thousands of channels of satellite data coming from space with cutting-edge prediction technology and products.

According to ECT, “There are over 50 Earth-viewing satellites in orbit continuously monitoring the Earth system, generating thousands of channels of global data in real time. There are more than 100 instruments on board the current constellation of Earth-observing satellites that look back at our planet gathering critical data about the land, oceans and atmosphere. The data streams back to Earth as thousands of channels of data every minute of every day. How much data is that? About the size of the Library of Congress, every hour.”…

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https://www.swvatoday.com/news/smyth_county/article_a707fbd4-bc74-11e4-8312-6b156be40c68.html