Lockheed Martin and NVIDIA will collaborate to build an artificial intelligence-driven Earth Observations Digital Twin for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The solution will provide NOAA with a centralized approach to monitor current global environmental conditions, including extreme weather events.
The two companies expect to fully integrate and demonstrate one of the variable data pipelines ⏤ sea surface temperature ⏤ by September 2023, one year after the initial contract award.
“At Lockheed Martin we regularly use digital twins and AI to provide our government customers with the clearest, current situational picture and actionable intelligence for their important missions,” said Matt Ross, senior program manager at Lockheed Martin Space.
“We’re pleased that we can use our technology experience to collaborate with NVIDIA on this project to provide NOAA a timely, global visualization for their own important missions.”
NOAA currently receives terabytes of data from numerous space and Earth-based sensor sources. Its administrators and researchers have to 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 to ingest, format and fuse observations from multiple sources into a gridded data product and detect anomalies.
The NVIDIA Omniverse Nucleus, the collaboration and database engine, will convert data into the Universal Scene Description framework to enable data-sharing. Agatha, a Lockheed Martin-developed visualization platform, will ingest this incoming data and allow users to interact with it in an Earth-centric 3D environment.
“Digital twins will help us solve the world’s hardest scientific and environmental challenges,” said Dion Harris, lead product manager of accelerated computing at NVIDIA. “The combination of Lockheed Martin’s AI technology with NVIDIA Omniverse will give NOAA researchers a powerful system to improve weather predictions at a global scale.”
