Swiss Researchers Secure NASA Climate Data

Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland transferred approximately 100 petabytes of NASA’s public climate and environmental data to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano. The transfer aims to safeguard the data and enable the training of artificial intelligence models.

This initiative responds to budget cuts impacting scientific research in the United States and ensures continued access to decades of critical information on Earth’s system, including greenhouse gases, precipitation, and glacial ice. The team also plans to recover significant datasets from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

These datasets will be used to develop AI models capable of faster and more reliable predictions in areas like weather forecasting and natural disaster risk assessment. Researchers note that data-driven “foundation models” are already exceeding the performance of traditional, physics-based climate simulations. The project acknowledges the essential role the US has played in Earth observation, but anticipates potential unpredictability in data access due to shifts in US science funding.