Overview and Status of the NOAA Joint Venture Partnerships Program Broad Agency Announcement – Earth Observing Digital Twins

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 public and private sector partners 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, Earth Observing Digital Twins (EODT), is to develop a prototype of the digital twin of the Earth environment for observations. This project aims to assess whether we can rethink our implementation of the environmental data processing enterprise. The intent of this project is also to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and to build an infrastructure capable of flexibly and simultaneously handling many sources of space- and ground-based observations, potentially across multiple enterprises and data sources. NOAA awarded three contracts to study the feasibility of using EODT. Those were completed between September 2022 and September 2024. The authors will provide an overview, status, and recommendations from the study.