NOAA Center for AI: Getting AI-Ready to Solve Earth and Space Science Challenges

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has established a Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI), in accordance with the 2020 National AI Initiative Act and NOAA’s AI strategy. The overall goals are to coordinate AI research, development, acquisition, information exchange, training and awareness. To foster NOAA’s AI proficiency, NCAI will lead NOAA initiatives on workforce development and AI-ready data standards, host training events and workshops, facilitate transition from research to operations, aid in the governance of AI, and facilitate new partnerships across industry, academia, and government. NCAI is now guiding a collection of key pilot projects to bring value to specific needs and capture lessons learned for all of NOAA, our partners and the public. NCAI plans to maintain a portal with open source AI applications for reuse and education.

As with other science-based agencies, NOAA is realizing the benefits of AI in core mission areas of environmental observation; data ingest and management; space science, climate, weather and ocean forecast and prediction; and marine ecosystem and fisheries management.

To realize transformative advancements in the quality, scope, and timeliness of NOAA's environmental science, products, and services, NOAA has established a strategy designed to accelerate and integrate AI into key mission areas, focusing on 1) enhanced forecast performance and skills, 2) increased efficiency and cost effectiveness in data-related NOAA mission areas, and 3) innovative ways to capitalize NOAA data assets.

This presentation describes NCAI’s formulation phase experiences for the space science community, including advancement of key pilot projects, the emergence of Communities of Practice, NOAA’s annual AI workshop, training needs assessments, and development of an AI-readiness standard for NOAA’s open environmental data. We will share emergent advances in NOAA's use of AI/ML techniques to advance earth and space science understand and applications.