In 2020, Congress passed the National AI Initiative Act, which formalized the mandate for NOAA’s pioneering coordination of artificial intelligence application across climate, ocean, Earth, and space sciences. Working across scientific fields and offices, NOAA has established a center for artificial intelligence to support ongoing projects and to propel new uses of AI technology to support environmental knowledge and study.
The NOAA Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) is developing under the leadership of a coalition of NOAA staff, affiliates, cooperative institutes, and partners. A major facet of NCAI is to build NOAA’s capacity to use AI and machine learning (ML) techniques to support NOAA’s mission to understand climate, weather, the ocean, and coasts.
AI became a NOAA science and technology strategy in 2019 to guide advancements in the quality and timeliness of NOAA science, products, and services. The strategy calls for the acceleration and expansion of AI applications across the agency to make “transformative improvements in NOAA mission performance and cost-effectiveness.” Using AI/ML, data can be processed more efficiently, thereby improving how science data and information are used. Furthermore, AI excels at identifying patterns in data that elude the human eye, offering improvements to many of our forecasting or prediction tools. NCAI efforts are showcased at NOAA.gov/AI.