Maxar today announced additional customers for its cloud-based numerical weather prediction (NWP), contributing to the growth of its WeatherDesk™ product line.
Earlier this year, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chose Raytheon Intelligence and Space to design and develop the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC). This program will establish an extramural center to unite academia, industry and government to help create the most user-friendly and user-accessible comprehensive Earth modeling system. Expertise from Maxar’s cloud-based solution for NWP will contribute to EPIC, allowing NOAA to better facilitate community modeling efforts. This will lead to faster development, testing and release of new versions of weather models, which will ultimately accelerate improvements in the National Weather Service’s operational weather and climate forecasting mission to save lives, protect property and strengthen the U.S. economy.
Maxar’s WeatherDesk team leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) High Performance Computing (HPC) to accelerate forecast creation. Teams of data scientists and engineers from Maxar and AWS collaborated to create an automated workflow offering customers a decision advantage. Maxar is applying that automated workflow to different use cases as subscription and professional consultation services for customers in a variety of industries, such as energy, insurance, agriculture and government. What started as an opportunity to support one use case has now scaled into applications for multiple NOAA models as well as international models.
Additionally, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), an independent intergovernmental organization supported by most of the nations of Europe, contracted Maxar to quantify its weather models’ performance in a suite of cloud-based architectures. Maxar also evaluated the cost of running these models on AWS, allowing a comparison with the use of ECMWF’s supercomputers. Maxar presented its analysis at ECMWF’s Virtual Workshop on Weather and Climate in the Cloud in February 2021.
“It’s exciting to see Maxar team members’ efforts to harness innovation to solve customer problems result in such varied uses and quick adoption,” said Dr. Walter Scott, Maxar’s Chief Technology Officer. “This project to extract Earth Intelligence faster using the cloud demonstrates our commitment to staying curious and putting the mission first. It provides crucial information for Maxar’s commercial customers to consider in their business-critical decisions while also helping the U.S. government modernize weather forecasting at a time when climate research is becoming more important."
In recognition of the innovativeness of this solution, AWS awarded Maxar the 2020 Public Sector Partner Award for Best High Performance Computing Solution.