NOAA teams up with Zignal Labs to advance storm weather reporting with AI-powere

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https://research.noaa.gov/noaa-teams-up-with-zignal-labs-to-advance-storm-weather-reporting-with-ai-powered-intelligence/

NOAA teams up with Zignal Labs to advance storm weather reporting with AI-powered intelligence

July 30, 2025

NOAA and Zignal Labs, a real-time intelligence company, are teaming up to assess how Zignal’s AI-powered capabilities can detect and analyze weather events from public and online media sources, and be used to augment NOAA’s storm reporting. Credit: Zignal Labs

NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) and National Weather Service (NWS), are partnering through a cooperative research and development agreement, (CRADA), with Zignal Labs on a project to explore how real-time, publicly-available data can improve the precision and timeliness of NOAA’s storm event reporting.

“This partnership supports the missions of OAR and NWS to deliver timely, accurate information that protects lives and property by testing new ways to enhance weather situational awareness,” said Gina Eosco, Ph.D., director of NOAA OAR’s Weather Program Office. “A pilot project will guide future collaborations with Zignal Labs and could shape how media-based data is used to improve the accuracy and quality of storm event reporting.”

“Zignal’s platform uses artificial intelligence to transform publicly available data into real-time operational insight,” said Adam Beaugh, Chief Executive Officer of Zignal Labs. “This collaboration with NOAA represents an important step toward strengthening existing systems by layering ground-truth data into broader intelligence frameworks – including those specific to emergency and disaster-related events – enhancing situational awareness and accelerating early warning.”

Over the next six months, NOAA and Zignal Labs will conduct a pilot project to assess how Zignal’s artificial intelligence-powered capabilities can be used to augment NOAA’s storm reporting. NOAA and Zignal will explore how this storm-related data could potentially be added to NOAA’s Storm Events Database, the official system of record for NWS storm reports and the nation’s authoritative archive of significant weather events.

Maintained by NWS, and housed on the website of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, the NOAA Storm Events Database captures detailed information on severe storms and other hazardous weather across the United States and supports a wide range of critical applications, including disaster response planning, insurance assessments, legal proceedings, forensic meteorology and scientific research conducted by OAR, private industry, and academia.

This innovative effort aims to complement NWS’s traditional storm tracking processes by evaluating Zignal’s capabilities in detecting and analyzing weather events from public and online media sources. The collaboration will include both a historical analysis of past storm events and a real-time pilot study using artificial intelligence to enhance analysis of hazardous weather, including flash floods, tornadoes, wildfires and hurricanes. The pilot will evaluate the feasibility of adding this new data to enhance NOAA’s Storm Events Database.  

Scientists from OAR’s Weather Program Office and NWS will assess how data collected from Zignal aligns with existing data in the Storm Events Database, while Zignal Labs will provide ongoing support and work collaboratively with OAR and NWS to refine its capabilities to meet the increasingly complex challenges presented by adverse and unexpected weather events.  The joint team will also work together on developing quality assurance protocols, integration methods, and a final report on lessons learned from the pilot.

NOAA regularly partners with private sector companies through cooperative research and development agreements to conduct research and development work that is mutually beneficial and helps to accomplish NOAA’s mission. NOAA CRADAs are coordinated through OAR’s Office of Research, Transition, and Application (ORTA) Technology Partnerships Office (TPO). This CRADA is part of a larger group of efforts to assess the use of AI-based forecast models at NOAA.