R2Home Sustainable Atmospheric Sensing wins over Meteomatics

Meteomatics just acquired R2Home. Founded in 2019 by Yohan Hadji, the Vaud-based project has developed an innovative glidersonde offering a cost-effective and sustainable alternative to conventional radiosondes.

For decades, radiosondes carried by weather balloons have been indispensable for collecting atmospheric data. However, a major environmental and operational drawback is that balloons drift with the wind, and radiosondes are often lost in the wild. Of the 600,000 or so radiosondes launched worldwide each year, an estimated 80% are never recovered, making them costly single-use devices with a notable impact on the environment.

Now dubbed the “Meteoglider” by Meteomatics, the glidersonde is an ideal complement to the startup's sustainable atmospheric sensing solutions, joining the ranks of our Meteodrone and Meteobase technologies. The Meteoglider is a 250-gram lightweight foam glider equipped with a radiosonde and a sophisticated guidance system. Carried by a weather balloon to an altitude of 30 kilometers, it collects the same high-quality atmospheric data as a conventional radiosonde. Its guidance system calculates the optimum trajectory to return to the launch site or a designated GPS position. This technology allows the Meteoglider to be reused several times, ensuring that its lithium battery and electronic components reach their full potential of hundreds of hours of operation before being properly disposed of.

The Meteoglider was tested some sixty times during the summer of 2024, including ten times from Payerne, by MeteoSwiss, in collaboration with Skyguide and the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA). Twice a day for 5 consecutive days, the glider successfully returned a radiosonde to Payerne, landing less than 15 meters from its launch point. Data quality analyses confirmed that the Meteoglider's measurements matched those of conventional radiosondes.

Joining Meteomatics

Contacted by Startupticker.ch, Yohan Hadji explains that Meteomatics has acquired the ultralight stratospheric glider technology developed by R2Home, all prototypes, knowledge, test flight experience and data. Meteomatics also acquired existing relationships with national meteorological services, civil aviation authorities and radiosonde manufacturers.

R2Home was born 5 years ago as a high school research project, when Yohan Hadji was 15 years old. Commenting on the milestone acquisition, the founder says: “I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to learn a lot, have a lot of fun and take the technology far enough for a company like Meteomatics to acquire it. Development at Meteomatics continues in the same direction. The first big change is the opportunity to leverage Meteomatics' existing R&D and sales resources to accelerate the development and deployment of the Meteoglider. The second is that I'm still quite young and sometimes a little too doubtful. This step erases some of my doubts forever.”

Yohan paused his master's degree at EPFL and joined Meteomatics to continue the technical development work on the Meteoglider. Together with his new team, Yohan hopes to be able to meet the demand for test campaigns with various national weather services in the coming month, before using the experience gained from these campaigns to propose a refined, industrialized solution in 2025.

(ES)