By Lauren Leese – As extreme weather events increase around the world due to climate change, the need for further research into our warming planet has increased as well. For NASA, climate research involves not only conducting studies of these events, but also empowering outside researchers to do the same. The artificial intelligence (AI) efforts spearheaded by the agency offer a powerful tool to accomplish these goals.<\/p>\n
In 2023, NASA teamed up with IBM Research to create an AI geospatial foundation model. Trained on vast amounts of NASA\u2019s widely used\u00a0Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS)<\/a>\u00a0data, the model provides a base for a variety of AI-powered studies to tackle environmental challenges. In keeping with open science principles,\u00a0the model is freely available for anyone to access<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Foundation models serve as a baseline from which scientists can develop a diverse set of applications, enabling powerful and efficient solutions. \u201cFoundation models only know what things are represented in the data,\u201d explained Manil Maskey, the data science lead at NASA\u2019s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer (OCSDO). \u201cIt\u2019s like a Swiss Army Knife\u2014it can be used for multiple different things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Once a foundation model is created, it can be trained on a small amount of data to perform a specific task. To date, the Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concept Team (IMPACT) along with collaborators have demonstrated the geospatial foundation model\u2019s capabilities by fine-tuning it to detect burn scars, to delineate flood water, and to classify crop and other land use categories.\u00a0 Read On:<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"