Featured Image Credit: NASA
NASA scientists have developed a new artificially intelligent tool that has the potential to save coastal towns up to $234 million a year.
This comes after a recent study revealed that the tool was able to ‘fuse data from multiple satellites and detect harmful algal blooms that occurred in western Florida and Southern California’.
According to NASA, these blooms can pose serious health risks which end up costing coastal economies within the US tens of millions of dollars each year.
On the NASA website, it states: “Areas in Florida such as Tampa Bay and Sarasota have wrestled with the problem for decades. A species called Karenia brevis can thrive in Gulf of America waters, spawning harmful algal blooms that kill wildlife, foul beaches, and sicken swimmers.
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“On the West Coast, blooms of Pseudo-nitzschia have poisoned hundreds of dolphins, California sea lions, and other marine animals in recent years. Toxins from algae can even enter the air and cause respiratory illness in humans.”
The paper on the matter was published in AGU Earth and Space Science, with one of the co-authors, Michelle Gierach, who is a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, stating: “At the very least, a tool like this can help us know where and when to collect water samples as an algal bloom is starting. It can also drive collaboration between specialists, fostering new ways to conduct the science and deliver decision-support products.”
The team at NASA have developed a ‘self-supervised machine learning system’, which has been designed to learn the patterns of various types of satellite data in order to compare them with field observations.
Recent testing of the tool appears to show that it is able to ‘correctly identify and map harmful blooms’.
Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, who is the lead program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said: “Applying self-supervised AI to massive streams of satellite data is rapidly becoming a powerful tool for generating actionable ocean intelligence.”
The team is now working to improve the tool further with more data and recent estimates appear to suggest that this device could shrink economic losses from the blooms by up to $234 a year.
Study author Kelly Luis added: “The aim of this work is to start to bridge technologies to better serve end users and their needs, from aquaculture to tourism. To do that, we’re going to bring all our NASA assets to the table.”
