NOAA partners with Brightband to make observational data AI-ready

NOAA will collaborate with startup Brightband. Credit: NOAA

NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory and Global Systems Laboratory and the artificial intelligence startup Brightband have entered into a two-year Cooperative Research And Development Agreement (CRADA) that will optimize a vast NOAA-managed archive of observational weather data for training artificial intelligence (AI)-based weather forecasting applications.

Under the CRADA, “Making NOAA Observation Data Artificial Intelligence-Ready,” NOAA will collaborate with Brightband to transform the NOAA NASA Joint Archive of observational data from satellites, weather balloons and surface stations into an open-source data a repository  that will support a suite of geospatial foundation AI models. The joint archive is a collaboration between NOAA and NASA that has developed a homogenized repository of Earth System observations from 1970 to present.

“The homogenized archive represents a great opportunity for AI developers across the weather enterprise,” said NOAA scientist Sergey Frolov, who leads the Physical Sciences Laboratory team involved in the project. “While individual pieces of data are available elsewhere, this will be a one-stop shop that significantly lowers the bar for entry for everyone who would like to leverage AI to improve forecasting.”