Sponsor
Scott Franklin
Representative · R-FL
Representative · R-FL
Directs NOAA to build AI‑ready weather and wildfire datasets, evaluate and integrate AI weather models with numerical models, support operational transition, and publish code/data openly by default.
Official title: To direct the use of artificial intelligence by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to adapt to extreme weather, and for other purposes.
Introduced April 9, 2025 by Scott Franklin · Last progress April 9, 2025
The bill would accelerate AI-enabled weather forecasting, public data access, and cross‑sector collaboration—potentially improving warnings and preparedness—while creating funding, privacy, validation, IP, and resource-allocation tradeoffs that could shift costs and risks onto taxpayers, agencies, and smaller stakeholders.
Communities (urban, rural) and emergency managers will get earlier, more accurate forecasts and warnings (including wildfire, seasonal/subseasonal) that improve preparedness and reduce weather-related losses.
Emergency managers, local officials, and forecasters gain improved impact‑based decision-support tools and technical guidance to make faster, more informed protection and response decisions.
Researchers, universities, and public agencies gain broader public access to NOAA data and code under defined open licenses, enabling reuse, reproducibility, and cost savings for taxpayers and local governments.
The bill provides no guaranteed new appropriations and expanding AI work will likely increase federal spending or require diverting NOAA staff/time and resources from other observational or modeling programs.
Collecting, curating, and sharing large observational and synthetic datasets and relying on non‑Federal AI models raise significant privacy, data governance, and proprietary-access risks that could limit transparency or expose sensitive information.
If AI models and synthetic/third‑party outputs are not rigorously validated, operational integration could introduce errors, false positives/negatives, or overreliance on black‑box models that harm public-safety decisions.
Based on analysis of 16 sections of legislative text.
Directs the NOAA Under Secretary to develop AI-ready training datasets, evaluate and integrate artificial intelligence weather models with traditional numerical models, and accelerate operational use of AI for weather, water, space weather, and wildfire forecasting. The bill requires dataset curation, model evaluation (reforecast analysis), public availability of code/data by default, workforce development, and new public‑private partnership options, with several required reports to Congress and timelines for specific deliverables. The law authorizes (subject to appropriations) competitive contracts, cooperative institute actions, and outside studies; requires best practices to limit environmental impacts of AI; and allows limited exceptions to open licensing to protect national security, certain intellectual property, and other sensitive information.