Weather Ready Pacific — Vanuatu's AI-Powered Forecasting Pilot with Tomorrow.io and USTDA

The U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) awarded a technical-assistance grant to Vanuatu's Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department (VMGD) to modernise the country's weather forecasting and early-warning systems, announced on 27 September 2024 as part of USTDA's "Weather Ready Pacific" programme, supporting the Pacific Islands Infrastructure Initiative and the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE). Vanuatu is one of the world's most cyclone- and disaster-exposed nations.

VMGD selected Tomorrow.io to deliver the technical assistance. The scope covers a detailed review of Vanuatu's existing weather-forecasting and early-warning services, development of an investment plan for new weather-observation and telecommunications infrastructure, and a pilot of Tomorrow.io's weather-intelligence platform, which the company describes as integrating AI/ML algorithms with satellite observations to speed up and sharpen forecasts and warnings. USTDA Director Enoh T. Ebong, VMGD Acting Director Fred Jockley, U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu Ann Marie Yastishock, and Tomorrow.io project lead Sebastien Boulay were named in the announcement.

As of the most recent public information available (mid-2026), no accuracy figures, forecast-lead-time improvements, or other performance results from the Vanuatu pilot itself have been published by USTDA, VMGD, or Tomorrow.io; the announcement describes project scope and objectives rather than measured outcomes, and no grant amount or firm completion date has been disclosed. This is a real, government-to-government-backed pilot worth tracking, but at this stage it is an early-stage needs assessment and technology trial rather than an evaluated success — the same caution the U.S. Trade and Development Agency's own announcement implicitly signals by describing the work as a review-and-plan phase rather than a completed deployment.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ustda.gov/ustda-vanuatu-partner-to-improve-weather-forecasting-and-disaster-preparedness/