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Lockheed Martin, NVIDIA Team on Digital Twin of Current Global Weather for NOAA

Nov. 17, 2022
The artificial-intelligence-driven system will fuse ground- and space-derived sensor data to provide a better and timelier world picture.

Predicting the weather has always been an inexact science, to say the least, but advances in technology are helping to close the gap between forecasts and what actually transpires in the real world. To that end, Lockheed Martin and NVIDIA have collaborated on an artificial-intelligence (AI)-driven "Earth Observations Digital Twin." It will provide the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with an efficient and centralized approach to monitor current global environmental conditions, including extreme weather events.

Presently, NOAA receives terabytes of data about its five earth systems domains—the cryosphere, land, atmosphere, space weather, and ocean—from numerous space- and Earth-based sensor sources. NOAA administrators and researchers must collect, combine, and analyze that information to observe and understand environmental conditions and changes.

The new Earth Observations Digital Twin—developed under contract with Lockheed Martin Space working with NVIDIA—will provide NOAA with a high-resolution, accurate, and timely depiction of global conditions, using current satellite- and ground-based observations.

For the project, Lockheed Martin’s OpenRosetta3D platform will utilize AI and machine learning (ML) to ingest, format, and fuse observations from multiple sources into a gridded data product and detect anomalies. NVIDIA’s Omniverse Nucleus, the collaboration and database engine of its Omniverse world simulation platform, will convert data into the Universal Scene Description framework, enabling data-sharing across multiple tools and between researchers. Agatha, a Lockheed Martin-developed visualization platform, will ingest this incoming data from Omniverse Nucleus and let users interact with it in an Earth-centric 3D environment.

The two companies expect to fully integrate and demonstrate one of the variable data pipelines—sea-surface temperature—by September 2023, one year after initial contract award.

About the Author

David Maliniak | Executive Editor, Microwaves & RF

I am Executive Editor of Microwaves & RF, an all-digital publication that broadly covers all aspects of wireless communications. More particularly, we're keeping a close eye on technologies in the consumer-oriented 5G, 6G, IoT, M2M, and V2X markets, in which much of the wireless market's growth will occur in this decade and beyond. I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, developers, and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy, leaving to rejoin the EOEM B2B publishing world in January 2020. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.

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