Overview and Status of of the Digital Twin for Earth Observations Using Artificial Intelligence Broad Agency Announcement Activity

The goal of the NOAA Joint Venture (JV) Partnership Program is to advance NOAA’s observational and data system capabilities by leveraging the investments of NOAA partners. JV allows NOAA to exploit the capabilities of its partners in both the public and private sectors as a means of advancing its own mission readiness while providing a high return on public funds.

In fiscal year 2022, JV initiated several projects with industry and other U.S. federal agencies, mainly NASA, to inform and potentially influence the planning of the next-generation space and ground architectures. One such project is the prototyping of a digital twin of the Earth environment for observations. This project aims to assess whether we can rethink our implementation of the environmental data ground processing enterprise. The intent of this project is also to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and to build an infrastructure to flexibly handle simultaneously many sources of space- and ground-based observations potentially across multiple enterprises and data sources. This will allow us to generate a variety of geophysical data products that encompass the different components of the Earth system including ocean, atmosphere, land and hydrology, and space weather. It also aims to improve data access by making it possible for our users to generate products from a variety of observing systems without having to acquire and process individual data sets.

The authors will provide a description of the past year’s activities and how they may open up opportunities for future products and services.