NOVEMBER 18, 2024 – U.S. Air Force and NASA officials gathered at the Pentagon to celebrate their collaboration and the initial operational capability of Global Hydro-Intelligence, a strategic tool designed to predict and manage water-related risks for military leaders.
Participating in the ceremony were Maj. Gen. John Klein Jr., Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations; Col. Patrick Williams, director of weather; Dr. Julie Robinson, deputy director of Earth Sciences at NASA Headquarters; Dr. Matthew Farthing, U.S. Army Engineer and Research Development Center, and Louis Escamilla, the Air Force Weather hydrology lead.
“It is a momentous event to mark the significant collaboration amongst so many organizations to bring GHI to the warfighter and decision makers,” Klein said. “We are extremely excited for the role that GHI is going to play in future operational planning and the enhanced situational awareness it’s going to bring to the fight.”
GHI integrates observations from various sources and uses state-of-the-art models to provide accurate, timely and mission-critical geospatial hydrological information, such as soil moisture, soil temperature, snow cover and vegetation health, which helps address and forecast extreme events, such as severe flooding.
“GHI-based products and services will, for the first time, establish a routinely available source of global water assessments spanning near-real-time analyses to future projections,” Williams said. “This will arm warfighters, planners, and decision makers with assessments of surface hydrology features and their potential effects across time scales.”
The event highlighted the successful collaboration of the Air Force and NASA as well as contributions from the Navy, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
According to Dr. Jerry Wegiel, NASA’s principal investigator for GHI, the driving factor behind GHI was to design, develop, and deliver an integrated framework for hydrologic information across all time scales to provide the U.S. government with a first of its kind trusted information set about the movement of water.
Robinson emphasized the importance of the capabilities that GHI delivers not just to the U.S. military but to other agencies as well.
“As human beings, of course we’re made up of water, and water is going in places and landing in places… and so having that information, having this in an operational system, is key, both for understanding our planet scientifically, but also for the intelligence that our war fighters need to make good plans and to execute their mission as well,” Robinson explained. This new capability aims to provide real-time insights into potential water crises, such as droughts, floods and water scarcity around the world, allowing decision-makers and diplomacy to have a greater effect before crisis turns to violence and the Armed Forces are called.
This game-changing capability brings together advanced remote sensing, atmospheric data analysis and hydrological modeling into the hands of our Air Force Weather professionals to create a global scale system for predicting and responding to water-related challenges, and weaponizing this capability to soften the battlespace for kinetic responses if necessary.
By Tech. Sgt. Nick Koetz
Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs