The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has teamed up with Google to explore the benefits of AI and ML for enhancing the former’s use of satellite and environmental data.

As part of the three-year OTA agreement, NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service (NESDIS) and Google will pilot specific AI- and ML-related projects to amplify NOAA’s environmental monitoring, weather forecasting, climate research, and technical innovation.

Research will initially focus on developing small-scale AI/ML systems.

With the results yielded from those efforts, NOAA and Google Cloud will then focus on executing full-scale prototypes that NOAA could ultimately operationalize across its organization.

If successful, this has the potential to be a significant leap in NOAA’s ability to leverage the enormous volume and diversity of environmental data in order to enhance prediction, including for extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes.

Through this agreement, NOAA and Google will work together on a number of projects, offering hands-on AI training opportunities to the NOAA workforce.

NOAA’s AI strategy aims to infuse new technologies and approaches to increase efficiency and skills through partnerships, training, and AI-related research and development.