Our NASA-Powered AI Does More Than Predict Your Wedding Weather

Planning a wedding, community festival, or even just a big family picnic months in advance always comes with one major uncertainty: the weather. Long-term forecasts are notoriously unreliable, leaving you to hope for the best. A novel solution called Tempus sidesteps this problem by looking to the past, using decades of historical climate data to give you the power of probability.

Instead of Predicting the Future, It Analyzes the Past

The core concept of Tempus is simple yet powerful: it uses historical data from NASA to calculate the probability of specific weather conditions for any date and location. Rather than giving you a dubious long-term forecast, it tells you the statistical likelihood of heat, rain, or high winds based on years of collected data. This approach is grounded in credible science, sourcing precipitation data from NASA’s GPM/IMERG and temperature, wind, and humidity data from MERRA-2. The cleverness here lies in its design philosophy: it reframes the user’s problem from the impossible, “What will the weather be?” to the actionable, “What are the chances of certain weather, and how should I prepare?” This replaces ambiguity with data-driven probability, allowing for much more informed planning.

The AI Doesn’t Predict—It Translates

The most critical feature of Tempus is how it uses artificial intelligence. The AI’s primary role isn’t to be a complex predictive model but to serve as a practical translator. This is a brilliant design choice because it demystifies the AI, replacing the “black box” of prediction with the transparency of probability, which in turn builds user trust. It takes dense, statistical climate data and converts it into natural, human-readable language that is immediately useful. This aligns with a growing understanding in technology design: as data becomes more complex, the most critical role for AI is often that of a translator, bridging the gap between raw information and human action.

The AI Assistant answers questions in real-time and provides practical conversions, turning raw numbers into actionable advice. For example:

• “High probability of heat after 1 p.m. → It’s better to schedule for the morning.”
• “35% chance of rain → You should consider a covered plan B.”
• “For 120 people for 3 hours → Reserve 240–360 liters of water.”

This translation layer is what makes the tool so effective. It democratizes complex climate data, making it accessible for anyone from an international tourist to a professional event planner.

Born from a NASA Challenge

Tempus began at the NASA Space Apps challenge, a hackathon where teams use NASA data to solve global challenges. Our team specifically tackled the “Will It Rain On My Parade?” challenge, which tasked participants with creating an app to determine the likelihood of adverse weather for a specific time and place. Despite being new to NASA datasets, our team successfully delivered a fully functioning product—no small feat for a hackathon.

Making Data Work for People

The team’s philosophy is rooted in a simple but profound question: what’s the point of having massive datasets if people can’t use them to make decisions? They see their role as translators, bridging the gap between complex information and everyday human needs.

Our mission:

what’s the point of all the data in the world if people can’t act on it? NASA’s datasets are incredible, but they need translation. That’s our role: to turn numbers into something like “bring 10 water coolers” or “avoid the afternoon heat.”

Looking Beyond the Forecast

For the wedding planner or festival organizer staring at a calendar a year out, Tempus transforms anxiety into confidence. It replaces the vague hope for a sunny day with a concrete, data-backed understanding of the climate they’re planning for. By combining reliable historical data with a practical, AI-driven translation engine, it empowers people to plan with clarity, turning uncertainty into calculated risk.

If we can make complex climate data this accessible, what other vast datasets are waiting to be translated for our daily lives?