TruWeather Solutions Breaks the Weather Paradigm for Drones and AAM

December 10, 2025 | Dawn Zoldi

For over a decade, TruWeather Solutions has focused on tackling one of the biggest hidden constraints on drones and advanced air mobility (AAM), the low-altitude “Weather Tax” that quietly erodes revenue, reliability and safety. By building purposefully placed sensor networks, high-resolution models and mission-ready decision tools, the company continues to turn weather from an uncontrollable cost into a strategic advantage for operators.

Seven-Year-Old Weather Diarist Turns Industry Weather Architect

Don Berchoff, TruWeather’s CEO, started journaling the weather at just seven years old. That early curiosity evolved into a career as an Air Force meteorologist beginning in 1984, where he designed regional weather centers, commanded an Air Force base and learned how tightly operations, weather and logistics must interlock to maximize airpower.

He later joined the National Weather Service (NWS) as Director of Science and Technology, where he oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in research and technology projects. At NWS Berchoff saw how much advanced capability was still “sitting on the shelf” instead of reaching aviation users. “So much great science and technology in the labs and universities needed a bridge over the ‘research-to-operations valley of death,’” he explained. This ultimately led him to leave the government and found TruWeather in 2015.

Closing the Low-Altitude “Weather Data Desert” and The ROI

The core problem Berchoff built TruWeather to solve revolves around the sparse, antiquated low-altitude weather observation system that underpins today’s aviation weather. Most ceiling, visibility and wind observations come from sensors at airports, with only about 3% of the United States having adequate low-altitude coverage. Even the FAA has acknowledged in its preamble to the Part 108 Notice of Public Rulemaking that between METAR sites, conditions quickly become uncertain, especially in poor weather. Above the surface, the National Weather Service launches weather balloons twice-daily at 91 locations across the United States to report low altitude winds. This leaves the boundary layer essentially a “weather data desert” for drones and eVTOLs that must operate in that space, according to Berchoff.

Berchoff says that this gap creates a “Weather Tax,” on the industry. He coined this phrase to describe the hidden cost of uncertainty that forces operators to cancel or delay missions that could have flown safely, or push into risk they cannot fully understand. In 2017, for example, the weather cost the U.S. economy an estimated 634 billion dollars, much of it tied to imperfect information. “Weather uncertainty costs money,” Berchoff emphasizes. His experience is that around 30% of aviation flights canceled for weather could actually have flown, had they had better intelligence.

TruWeather’s thesis is straightforward: fill low-altitude gaps with dense ground-based and airborne sensors around high-use corridors, fuse those data with models and deliver route-specific intelligence that operators can trust. The company aims to help businesses fly safely with roughly 30% more flight time in windows that today would be grounded by uncertainty, to recapture revenue and avoid weather-induced idle time.

Berchoff targets at least a 4:1 return on investment. “Keep in mind, the Go/No Go decision for an electric air taxi flight from Manhattan to JFK occurs 2 to 3 hours in advance to allow time to move passengers by ground transportation if the weather is uncertain. If we save you 10% of your flights because we have better data, how much is that generating for you in revenue, cost avoidance, or in the case of public safety, mission uptime?” he asks. For drone-as-first-responder programs, logistics networks or eVTOL services where each canceled sortie is a visible hit to both revenue and public confidence, even a modest increase in reliable flight time can justify investment in TruWeather-powered weather services.

“Opening the Data Spigot”: The WISE Network

To break the current weather paradigm, TruWeather has created WISE (Weather Intelligence Sensor Ecosystem), a multi-domain network designed to be the benchmark for better low-altitude data. WISE plugs in novel sensors such as mobile micro-weather stations, vertical and scanning wind lidars, ceilometers, visibility sensors, cameras and even weather instrumented drones, to create what Berchoff describes as a “3D reconstruction of the low-level atmosphere.”

Berchoff is candid about why this matters for today’s AI and modeling hype cycles. “You have to have data to do machine learning,” he said. Training models on best-guess weather analysis fields simply compound uncertainty. TruWeather is training models on real data. In Dallas–Fort Worth (DFW), TruWeather, with MetroWeather, and the assistance of Perot field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, has deployed three scanning wind lidars that can see out 5–10 kilometers, plus vertical lidars and ceiling/visibility sensors between airports. These sensors will soon feed data into downscaled urban models that resolve building-level wind effects up to about 2,000 feet. This allows TruWeather to show operators beyond just that winds are strong. It shows precisely how those winds swirl around specific structures and vertiports. This allows operators to adjust routes upwind of turbulence and risk hotspots, when needed.

“We’re trying to break the weather paradigm and open up the spigot for innovation,” Berchoff said. Part of that mission involves relentless advocacy. Berchoff helped shape a new ASTM F38 weather specification standard, providing a framework for the FAA’s draft Part 146 concept designation of weather providers as Automated Data Service Providers (ADSPs) instead of simply Supplemental Service Providers. Through years of effort, Berchoff has helped forge a regulatory pathway for trusted third-party weather providers to meaningfully participate in the aviation ecosystem.

TruWeather’s Product Suite: Situational Awareness to Precision Routing

TruWeather’s value proposition is organized into tiered offerings that build from core situational awareness to highly localized, sensor-driven precision services:

Core: A powerful V360 baseline package combining government, commercial, and crowdsourced weather datasets—over 50,000 data points—to deliver richer context than METARs alone. Gives operators a clear picture of what’s happening between airports, supported by built-in analytics and decision tools.

Products within the V360 base package include:

Essential: Builds on the V360 Core package with TruWeather’s proprietary sensor network, delivering sharper, hyperlocal insight where it matters most. Available in select regions.

Precision: Includes all V360 Essential features, augmented with advanced analytics, proprietary atmospheric models, and sensor-enhanced predictions for the highest level of forecast accuracy. (Coming in 2026)

Topflight: Combines all V360 advanced analytics, proprietary atmospheric modeling, and operational decision tools with near real-time, machine learning–enhanced urban wind predictions and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) airflow visualizations for maximum accuracy in complex environments. (Coming in 2026)

TruWeather delivers many of these capabilities via APIs which partners can integrate directly into their platforms for machine-to-machine transfer to drive operator analytics. It also allows operators to see weather in their native workflows, rather than juggling multiple disconnected apps. TruWeather’s data also supports regulatory cases, such as BVLOS waivers that rely on documented ceiling and visibility along a route, reducing the friction in proving compliance. “The key is how does it help the workflow of the end user?” Berchoff stressed. TruWeather’s ROI lies in not only better data, but consistent weather workflows to drive seamless weather insights that reduces friction in scheduling, dispatch and ops control…and simply put, enable missions.

“Cutting and Pasting” a Weather Network: Ten Sites and Growing

TruWeather has deployed low-altitude networks at ten different locations across the United States, funded through a blend of NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards, U.S. DOT SMART Grants, State grants and commercial investments. Sites include the AllianceTexas in the DFW region, GrandSKY in North Dakota, Ohio DoT, Bedrock/Detroit, Washington–Warren Airport with partners Xelevate in North Carolina, and a growing California testbed around Hollister and the Monterey Bay region in partnership with Skyway and DART.

A notable highlight, in North Texas, TruWeather and partners such as Hillwood, the City of Fort Worth, and the North Central Texas Council of Governments have fielded what Berchoff describes as “the best operational low-altitude weather network in the world right now” for drone and AAM testing. As part of an NTAP waiver effort around DFW, TruWeather hopes to demonstrate how certified third‑party weather services can support UTM and BVLOS operations at scale, with the ASTM standard providing a means of compliance. This initiative, supported by a NASA urban weather sensing testbed and a USDOT SMART Grant, serves more than just drones and eVTOLs. The team designed it to also enable  autonomous trucking, road weather and flood-aware ground mobility.​

Berchoff views this, and the other nine deployments, as templates. The objective is to prove the technical and business case, including the regulatory acceptance of third‑party data under ASTM and Part 146 , and then “cut and paste” the model into other regions, with costs amortized across multiple operators and use cases. These public–private testbeds combined with the FAA’s new eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) regional ecosystems and evolving standards, will determine how quickly the industry can move from pilots to sustainable, revenue-generating operations, in his opinion.

“Tying the Hose” Everywhere: Scaling Data, Standards and Market Access

Looking to 2026, TruWeather’s priorities fall into four main tracks: deepening the Texas ecosystem, expanding in eIPP selected markets, maturing standards and certification pathways and expanding data access through a weather marketplace.

In Texas, TruWeather will focus on turning sophisticated urban wind modeling and lidar‑assimilated fields into usable, route-level products that can be easily consumed by operators and integrated into their systems, without forcing them to store massive grids or manage complex data pipelines.

In parallel, TruWeather is helping to update the ASTM weather standard to better serve Part 146, and define what a future aviation weather services oversight structure could look like so that third‑party providers can be trusted and certified.

The company is also building a data lake and a weather data marketplace that would allow users to purchase specific sensor datasets, such as vertical wind profiles, whether for research, fire management, pollution dispersion or other applications. It will make this data available, even if users do not subscribe to the full TruWeather service suite.

For Berchoff, TruWeather’s 2026 aim is to “tie our hose into as many systems as possible,” enabling platform partners and eIPP ecosystems to benefit from the company’s low-altitude intelligence. He plans to accelerate industry-wide movement beyond line-of-sight and toward sustainable, repeatable and weather-resilient operations. Given how far TruWeather has come, and brought the industry along with it, undoubtedly, this vision will become reality.

Watch Don Berchoff on the Dawn of Autonomy podcast, Episode #100.