AWS Public Sector Blog
Author: Zac Flamig
Zac Flamig is a tech business development manager for open data at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Zac is an Earth scientist with an interest in using remote sensing and in situ measurements to make the world a better place. His particular focus area so far has been floods; he developed a hydrologic modeling framework to forecast flooding that is used by the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) and NASA.
How open data from weather radar helps scientists improve environmental understanding
Weather radars see more than just the weather: they see smoke from fires, meteors, birds, mayflies, and almost anything else in the atmosphere. This makes weather radars an invaluable tool for scientists seeking to further the understanding of atmospheric processes and anything else that happens to be flying through the radar’s field of view. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability-related innovation and research by helping to minimizing the cost and time required to store, acquire, and analyze large weather and climate datasets.
Building cloud-based community knowledge about machine learning to predict and understand extreme weather
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It engages in large-scale Earth system science research projects in collaboration with the broader university community. NCAR hosts visitors from around the world, develops community models including the Community Earth System Model and the Weather Research and Forecasting Model, and maintains supercomputers, observational systems, and aircraft to support further study on the how the planet works. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Dr. David John Gagne, machine learning (ML) scientist at NCAR, to share how open data and machine learning on AWS are impacting the way we predict and understand extreme weather.