Zachary Kopel ’26 has developed a forecasting tool now in use by the U.S. Space Force to help predict dangerous convective wind events, including microbursts that can threaten rockets during launch operations.
Kopel built the tool, which combines a forecasting index with a machine learning model, as part of his senior design project. The project, called the Microburst Day Potential Index, uses data from weather balloon soundings, including temperature, pressure and dew point readings, run through a Python-based physics engine, to calculate the likelihood of a microburst on a given day.
Convective wind events like microbursts are sudden, powerful gusts of wind that drop out of storm clouds and produce winds of 30 knots (34.5 mph) or greater. In severe cases, some reach the intensity of an EF-1 tornado, with gusts of 80 mph to 90 mph. Along the Space Coast, those winds can damage a rocket’s navigational components, particularly while it is exposed atop the crawler transporter as it moves from the Vertical Assembly Building to the launchpad.
Kopel tested his index against 31 convective wind events, including 14 confirmed microbursts, using data from the 45th Weather Squadron and Cape Canaveral soundings obtained through the University of Wyoming. The model correctly identified 13 of 14 microburst events, with one miss and three false alarms. The calculations run in seconds on a personal laptop, without a server or data center.
Kopel later paired his index with a machine learning model trained on nine years of weather data, 2011 to 2019, covering more than 2,800 days, including 722 days when a wind warning was issued. Instead of a hard cutoff, the model works more like a weather app’s rain forecast, giving forecasters a percentage chance of a warning-level wind event so they can judge how much caution is warranted.
In testing, Kopel’s model caught about as many dangerous wind events as existing methods but lowered the false alarm rate from about 77% to 54%, making it far more useful for real-world decisions.
Kopel said presenting the finished project to the Space Force in May was a milestone moment.
“I was able to achieve a full-circle moment,” Kopel said. “I can remember visiting Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as a kid and hoping that one day I would get to be a part of what they do. And getting to present my hard work to the people I admire was really a dream come true for me.”
Kopel said he hopes the work makes launches safer and could open a path toward a career as a launch weather officer.
“I want it to help keep people and equipment safer across the Eastern Range and, potentially, be my opening to make a career as a launch weather officer, so I can combine my love of both weather and spaceflight,” he said.
