EOIR Cloud Capabilities

Clouds can be great. They’re fun to look at and sometimes they provide shade. There are some great clouds and some mediocre clouds, and then there are some clouds that disrupt your mission development. Those clouds are the worst, and they give other clouds a bad name.

Enter, STK’s EOIR capability to provide us with peace of mind as it models even the cloudiest days. Whether you are looking at the Earth from above...

Or at the skies...

EOIR has your back.

For example: suppose I want to know how clouds and atmospheric conditions would affect my ability to image an aircraft.

Can I see my target through a layer of clouds? How about with a thermal or visible-light camera? I first compared a simulation with thermal and visible-light cameras with and without clouds. You could say that set my baseline. Then I added MODTRAN into the mix. Since there are so many parameter combinations — for two cameras — I automated the scenario in Python to stay organized.

Next, I threw together a script to analyze the mission. I wanted to assess the same sequence of events but change a single variable at a time.

This enabled me to understand my mission's success. If I had not analyzed the cloud and atmospheric conditions in the design phase, I may not have understood why I lost sight of my target in the operational phase, leading to a critical mission failure. Using STK, I fine tuned and changed conditions to understand their impact on my mission's success.

Determining when a system can detect, track, identify, and characterize targets of interest under operational conditions, including clouds and atmospheric effects, is critical to the success of a mission. Using EOIR, you can model, simulate, and analyze these effects.

Interested in modeling clouds in your mission? Then check out our Cloud Modeling with STK EOIR tutorial. Want to learn more about this study? Then check out the EOIR Cloud Modeling Demo and the EOIR Scenario Analysis at the AGI GitHub.