Artificial Intelligence in Support of Coastal and Ocean Resilience to Climate Change

Coastlines are facing incredible challenges, from sea level rise to collapsing marine ecosystems. To identify ways to enhance the adaptive capacity and climate resilience National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects vast amounts of data through various streams including satellites, aircraft, vessels, and monitoring systems to provide science and information and to support a climate-smart nation. As NOAA master big data storing and management, there is now a forward-thinking in applying intelligent and advanced forms of big data analytics to extract even more value from the data and information. In particular, applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) which can provide cognitive capabilities across large volumes of data, giving NOAA the ability to apply the next level of analytics needed to extract value from the data to address coastal resilience. The big data analytics associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) will profoundly affect climate analysis, as large amounts of data are sifted in near real time—if not eventually in real time—thereby providing NOAA and especially National Ocean Service (NOS) a level of analysis and productivity heretofore unseen to address complex scientific and multifaceted issue and gain actionable insight to support coastal intelligence and coastal ocean resilience. In this paper, we first provide an overview of NOAA big data and various NOS ML applications and their performance to address coastal resilience, and finally we identify some transformative directions for future development of and implementation of AI/ML to improve our capabilities to address coastal resilience.