GENEVA: Researchers have copied massive quantities of publicly-available climate and environmental data from Nasa onto a Swiss supercomputer to train artificial intelligence models — and for safekeeping amid US funding cuts.

Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) university announced the move late last week, saying its researchers had copied around 100 petabytes of Nasa data to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in the southern city of Lugano.

“The sheer amount is impossible to visualise,” Reto Knutti, professor of climate physics and head of ETH’s Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM), said.

It had taken approximately a year to copy the roughly six billion files, he said — the equivalent of around 20 million feature-length films, in terms of data volume. And going forward, the researchers are also planning to copy large quantities of datasets from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The datasets, gathered over decades, contain vital information about Earth systems, including greenhouse gases, clouds, precipitation and ice sheets. They will be used to help train AI models capable of swift and reliable forecasting in areas like weather, climate and natural hazards.

Though it was not the main driver for the move, the researchers said their mission was partly motivated by concern over the impact of dramatic US funding cuts for the scientific community.

ETH professor and former Nasa chief scientist Thomas Zurbuchen, who initiated the data transfer, highlighted in a statement the key role the United States had played in Earth observation for decades.

Without the extensive measurement programmes run by Nasa and NOAA, the world “would know far less about our planet today”, he said.

But since his return to office last year, US President Donald Trump has pursued deep cuts to federal climate science and Earth-observation funding, including programmes that contribute data to international monitoring networks. Knutti pointed out that “so far, the US has not restricted access to the data”.

“But we also know that decisions in the US administration are sometimes quick, and not completely obvious.” All the data copied so far had been publicly available, he stressed. “It’s not a secret.” “Data is the new gold,” Knutti said.

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2026