NASA, IBM Plan to Use AI in Climate Change Research – MeriTalk

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and computing giant IBM plan to use artificial intelligence (AI) tech to improve climate change research, according to an announcement IBM posted on Feb. 1. Under the new partnership, NASA and IBM will create AI foundation models to analyze petabytes of text and remote-sensing data to make it easier to build AI applications tailored to specific climate change questions and tasks. "We hope these models will make information and knowledge more accessible to everyone and encourage people to build applications that make it easier to use our datasets to make discoveries and decisions based on the latest science," said Rahul Ramachandran, a senior research scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Foundational AI models can ingest massive amounts of raw data and find their underlying structure without explicit instruction. NASA is currently sitting on 70 petabytes of earth science data – a number expected to quadruple this year and into 2024 with future mission launches.