Image credit: NASA/Colorado State University

While skiers dash down slopes, sensors will be keeping score not for the games, but for the weather around them. Twenty agencies from 11 countries are studying the weather in PyeongChang, South Korea during the Olympics from the ground and space as part of the International Collaborative Experiments for PyeongChang 2018 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (ICE-POP).

“The Olympics provide a means to test some of our observation methods and help develop prediction models in a real-world applied environment and enable our observations to be used by the forecasters and Olympic planning folks as well,” said Manuel Vega, a NASA engineer who usually works at the Goddard Space Flight Center and is stationed in a South Korean weather office for the project.