NASA GLOBE Cloud Challenge, 2022
42,700 observations
From 89 countries across all seven continents, 15 January to 15 February 2022, NASA9
Section IOverview
A compact, sourced account of two distinct subjects that share a name. The first is atmospheric clouds, observed from the ground by citizen scientists during the NASA GLOBE Cloud Challenge of 2022. The second is the worldwide cloud computing market through full-year 2025.
The repository accompanying this page, ruddro-roy / globe-cloud-insights, was written first as a data project on atmospheric clouds. It pulls citizen-science observations from the GLOBE Program, cleans them, and renders them in an interactive dashboard so that a reader can see where the volunteers stood, what they recorded, and how the recordings vary across geography, time, and sky condition. The companion edition you are reading now adds a second layer for context, namely the cloud infrastructure market, because the word cloud is shared and is easily confused.
Where the worldwide market figures appear, two complementary readings are used. The first is the cloud infrastructure services estimate produced by Synergy Research Group, a quarterly industry tally that includes infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and hosted private cloud. The second is the segment revenue that the largest providers themselves report to securities regulators or to investors. Where the two views diverge, the scope is named in line.
Satellite matches in the same campaign
49,450 matches
Ground observations within 15 minutes of a satellite overpass, against a goal of 20,000, NASA9
Cloud computing market, full year 2025
$419 billion
Cloud infrastructure services revenue, Synergy Research Group1
A note on scope and on the word cloud
This page treats two subjects in turn and never blends them. Atmospheric clouds, the subject of the NASA GLOBE Observer protocol and of the repository's data pipeline, are condensed water and ice in the sky. Cloud computing, the subject of Sections III through V, is the rental of remote servers, storage, and platforms by businesses and developers. The first is measured in observations, photographs, and satellite matches. The second is measured in revenue and market share. Where market figures appear, three further definitions sit close together. Cloud infrastructure services, as Synergy uses the term, covers infrastructure, platform, and hosted private cloud and reached about $419 billion in 2025. Public cloud end-user spending, as Gartner uses it, is broader and includes software as a service. Segment revenue is what a single provider reports for its own cloud business. Each figure below names its scope.
Section IIThe NASA GLOBE Project
A citizen-science campaign on atmospheric clouds, and the repository it produced.
This repository began as a record of atmospheric cloud observations, not a record of cloud computing. Its data subject is the NASA GLOBE Cloud Challenge of 2022, an intensive observation period of the GLOBE Program's Clouds protocol. Between 15 January and 15 February 2022, volunteers around the world used the GLOBE Observer mobile application to step outside, look up, identify cloud type and sky cover, photograph the sky, and upload the result. Where a satellite passed within fifteen minutes of an observation, the observation was tagged as a satellite match and made available to research teams that work with NASA and NOAA satellite imagery.9
Why the campaign exists
Satellites read clouds from above. They see cloud tops well, but they have a harder time distinguishing cloud bases from snow on the ground, separating thin upper clouds from thick lower clouds, and resolving multiple cloud layers at once.12 A volunteer standing on the ground, by contrast, sees the underside of the cloud deck and the layers above it. Pairing the two views, ground and orbit, produces a cleaner record than either gives on its own. The Cloud Challenge of 2022 was framed by NASA as Clouds in a Changing Climate, the same framing that shapes the agency's research portfolio on cloud feedback to the climate system.10
What the campaign produced
NASA reported more than 42,700 cloud observations from 89 countries across all seven continents, from a community of more than 7,000 volunteers, with over 108,000 sky photographs uploaded and more than 49,450 satellite matches recorded against an original goal of 20,000. The CLOUD GAZE classification effort, in which volunteers tagged photographs taken by other observers, added more than 321,100 classifications.9 These numbers are the upstream figures behind the dataset that this repository ingests.
Bundled sample, rows
500 observations
Committed at data/processed/globe_clouds_2022_clean.parquet, period 15 January to 15 February 202214
Mean cloud cover in sample
53.4 percent
Median 70 percent, derived per the GLOBE sky-condition mapping in src/globe_cloud_insights/clean.py14
Most frequent cloud genus in sample
Stratocumulus
95 of 500 rows tag this genus, ahead of Altocumulus 91 and Cumulonimbus 8814
Most frequent surface condition
Snow
138 of 500 rows, with Dry 136, Ice 116, Wet 110, consistent with a January and February campaign14
The bundled sample, at a glance
| Field | Value in this repository | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Protocol | GLOBE Clouds, sky_conditions | globe.gov, Clouds protocol13 |
| Date range | 15 January 2022 to 15 February 2022 | observer.globe.gov, clouds-data11 |
| API endpoint | api.globe.gov/search/v1/measurement/protocol/measureddate | globe.gov, GLOBE API |
| Rows in committed sample | 500, after the quality filters in clean.py | data/README.md14 |
| Distinct countries in committed sample | 7, namely India, Germany, Japan, the United States, France, Australia, Brazil | Computed from globe_clouds_2022_clean.parquet14 |
| Latitude range in committed sample | 59.4 degrees south to 70.0 degrees north | Computed from the parquet sample14 |
| Longitude range in committed sample | 167.8 degrees west to 169.3 degrees east | Computed from the parquet sample14 |
| Sky condition labels present | Clear, Few, Scattered, Broken, Overcast, Obscured | GLOBE protocol; counts in figure below13 |
| Cloud genera present | Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus, Stratocumulus, Altocumulus, Cumulonimbus | GLOBE protocol; counts in figure below13 |
| Cloud opacity labels | Transparent 173, Thin 167, Opaque 160 of 500 rows | Computed from the parquet sample14 |
What the dashboard does
The repository ships an interactive Streamlit dashboard with four views. The first is a world map that plots every observation as a point, with clusters that surface where activity was densest. The second is a daily timeline that reveals how observation volume rose and fell across the campaign period. The third is a panel of distributions, namely a sky-condition donut, a cloud-cover histogram, and a top-countries bar. The fourth is a searchable table of raw rows with a one-click CSV download. Two pre-executed Jupyter notebooks, 01_fetch_and_clean.ipynb and 02_exploratory_analysis.ipynb, hold the inferential side of the analysis, including a Pearson correlation, a chi-square goodness-of-fit test, and a Kruskal-Wallis test on cloud cover by sky condition.
Method and limits
The pipeline is straightforward and is documented in the repository. Raw rows arrive from the GLOBE API in weekly chunks, written to data/raw/globe_clouds_2022.csv. Quality filters drop any row that is missing a latitude, a longitude, or a timestamp, and any row whose coordinates fall outside the valid ranges of plus or minus 90 and plus or minus 180 degrees. Where a row reports a sky condition but no cloud cover percentage, the percentage is filled in from the GLOBE protocol mapping, namely Clear at 0 percent, Few at 15 percent, Scattered at 40 percent, Broken at 70 percent, Overcast at 95 percent, and Obscured at 100 percent. The cleaned output is the parquet file referenced above.
What this repository does not claim is also worth stating. The committed sample is 500 rows, drawn to make the dashboard, the notebooks, and the test suite work without an API key or a download step. It is not the full Cloud Challenge dataset of 42,700 plus observations, and the country distribution in the sample, seven countries, should not be read as a coverage statistic for the campaign as a whole, which spans 89 countries. The sample is also a fixed slice in time, namely the campaign window of 15 January to 15 February 2022, and it carries no claim about cloud cover trends outside that window. The page does not derive a climate signal from a one-month window, and the dashboard is presented as an exploratory and educational tool, not a research-grade reanalysis.
A note on the inspiration
The author of this repository volunteered remotely with the GLOBE Observer Clouds program from 5 May to 1 October 2022, after the Cloud Challenge concluded. That experience, of standing outside with a phone pointed at the sky and identifying cloud genera while a satellite passed overhead, motivated the open-source project gathered here. The repository is a tribute to the citizen-science campaign and an attempt to make the resulting dataset legible to anyone who wants to read it without writing code.
Section IIIMarket Size
A quarter past one hundred billion dollars, growing at roughly thirty percent.
Synergy Research Group, which tracks vendor revenue across infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and hosted private cloud, reported that worldwide spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $119.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 and $419 billion for the full year. Year over year quarterly growth was about thirty percent, a pace the firm attributes in large part to artificial intelligence workloads now riding on top of the existing cloud estate.
The broader figure for public cloud end-user spending, which adds software as a service to the infrastructure layer, sits well above the Synergy number. IDC projects that public cloud spending will surpass one trillion dollars in 2026 and approximately double by 2029, a compound annual rate above twenty percent. Gartner's most-cited tabulation, in turn, places public cloud end-user spending near $595 billion in 2024 and forecasts roughly $723 billion in 2025, a year on year increase of about twenty-one and a half percent.8 Each of these readings can be reconciled with the others once the scope is named.
Quarterly track, 2025
The Synergy series shows a market that is enlarging rather than merely defending its base. Quarterly revenue advanced from approximately $94 billion in Q1 2025 to $119.1 billion in Q4 2025, with growth averaging in the high twenties on a year-over-year basis. The fourth quarter alone added more than $25 billion to the running annualised total compared with the same quarter a year earlier.
Composition
Within the Synergy boundary, infrastructure and platform services account for the great majority of revenue, with hosted private cloud a smaller residual. The same firm notes that the share of revenue tied to artificial intelligence workloads has been rising quarter on quarter, even though most installed capacity still serves general-purpose applications.
Section IVProviders
Three firms hold roughly two thirds of the cloud infrastructure market. Behind them, two more report cloud businesses that are growing quickly from a smaller base.
Q4 2025 share, cloud infrastructure services
Synergy Research Group's reading of the December 2025 quarter places Amazon at twenty-eight percent of worldwide cloud infrastructure services revenue, Microsoft at twenty-one percent, and Google at fourteen percent.1 The remaining thirty-two percent is divided across a long tail that includes Oracle, IBM, Salesforce, Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, and a wide assortment of regional and specialist providers.
Reading the table below
The figures in the next table are segment revenues reported by each provider for its own cloud business. The reporting boundary differs by company, so the totals are not interchangeable with the Synergy estimate, and they are not strictly additive across vendors. Each row links to the source filing or release for verification.
Reported segment revenue, full-year 2025 and Q4 2025
| Provider | Segment | Q4 2025 revenue | Q4 YoY | Full year 2025 | FY YoY | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | AWS segment | $35.6 B | +24% | $128.7 B | +20% | Amazon SEC filings2 |
| Microsoft | Azure | n/d | n/d | > $75 B | +34% | Microsoft Annual Report3 |
| Microsoft | Microsoft Cloud | n/d | n/d | > $168 B | +23% | Microsoft Shareholders Meeting 20253 |
| Alphabet | Google Cloud | $17.7 B | +48% | > $70 B run rate | n/d | Alphabet investor page4 |
| Oracle | Cloud, IaaS plus SaaS | $6.7 B | +27% | $24.5 B | +24% | Oracle Investor Relations5 |
| Oracle | Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS) | $3.0 B | +52% | $10.2 B | +50% | Oracle Investor Relations5 |
| Alibaba | Cloud Intelligence Group | $6.19 B | +36% | n/d | n/d | Alibaba Group, Quarterly Results6 |
Notes. Amazon's fiscal year aligns with the calendar year, and AWS results are taken from Amazon's annual filing for FY2025. Microsoft's fiscal year ends in June, so the Azure and Microsoft Cloud full-year figures correspond to Microsoft FY2025, the year ended June 2025, as disclosed by the company. Alphabet's fiscal year aligns with the calendar year, and the Google Cloud annualised run rate is taken from prepared remarks for the December 2025 quarter. Oracle's fiscal year ends in May, so the FY2025 cloud figures correspond to the year ended May 2025 as reported in Oracle's quarterly releases. Alibaba's quarterly figures are taken from its English-language quarterly releases; the December 2025 quarter is reported in US dollars at the company's stated translation rate. The label n/d means a point not separately disclosed at the granularity sought.
Provider notes
Amazon Web Services
AWS, the cloud business of Amazon.com, Inc., reported segment sales of $35.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 and $128.7 billion for the full year, with year over year growth of twenty-four percent for the quarter and twenty percent for the year, according to the firm's SEC filing.2 Segment operating income for the year was $45.6 billion. Amazon's management has flagged a sharp rise in capital expenditure tied to data centre build-out for artificial intelligence training and inference workloads, a theme echoed by every other firm in this section.
Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Cloud
Microsoft Corporation reports two overlapping cloud aggregates. The narrower, Azure, is Microsoft's hyperscale infrastructure and platform business. The broader, Microsoft Cloud, also includes Microsoft 365 commercial cloud services, the commercial portion of LinkedIn, and Dynamics 365. The company's FY2025 Annual Report states that Azure surpassed $75 billion in annual revenue, up thirty-four percent year over year, while Microsoft Cloud surpassed $168 billion, up twenty-three percent.3 Microsoft's fiscal year ended in June 2025.
Google Cloud
Alphabet Inc. reported Google Cloud revenue of $17.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up forty-eight percent year over year, with the segment ending the year above a $70 billion annualised run rate, according to the company's quarterly release and prepared investor remarks.4 The same remarks reported that the firm's cloud revenue backlog rose by approximately fifty-five percent quarter over quarter to about $240 billion, signalling an unusually long order book carried into 2026.
Oracle Cloud
Oracle Corporation reports cloud results across two boundaries. The broader, Cloud Services and License Support, was $44.0 billion for fiscal 2025. The narrower, Cloud Services by itself, was $24.5 billion, of which Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the firm's hyperscale offering, contributed $10.2 billion, up fifty percent year over year. Oracle's fiscal year ends in May, so these figures cover the year ended May 2025, per the company's investor news archive.5
Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Group's Cloud Intelligence Group reported revenue of approximately $6.19 billion in the December 2025 quarter, up thirty-six percent year over year, with management noting that artificial intelligence related product revenue posted triple-digit growth for the seventh consecutive quarter. Earlier in the same fiscal year, the September 2025 quarter recorded $5.59 billion, up thirty-four percent, and the March 2025 quarter recorded $4.15 billion, up eighteen percent, according to the firm's quarterly results.6
Section VOutlook
Two simple readings, side by side, give the shape of the next two years.
Trajectory
If the worldwide cloud infrastructure services market continues to add revenue at the pace recorded in late 2025, full-year revenue inside the Synergy boundary is on track to clear $500 billion in 2026. That figure is consistent with IDC's projection that the broader public cloud category, which adds software as a service, will surpass one trillion dollars in 2026 and approximately double by 2029, growing at a compound annual rate above twenty percent.7
Capacity
The growth in revenue is being matched, perhaps for the first time in the cloud era, by an equally striking growth in committed capital expenditure. The leading providers have signalled aggregate spending of several hundred billion dollars on data centres, accelerators, and power in 2026, which will reshape the supply side as much as artificial intelligence is reshaping the demand side. The pace of that build, and how much of it converts into productive revenue, is the principal question for the year ahead.
A note on uncertainty
Forecasts in this field are subject to revision as analyst firms reweight currency translation, redefine segment boundaries, and revise prior quarters. The figures above were correct as of their published dates and are linked to their sources for verification. Where this page paraphrases analyst forecasts, the originating source is named in the body and listed below; where it reports company results, the relevant filing or release is linked.
Section VISources
Primary disclosures, NASA and GLOBE Program references, and analyst reports cited in the body of this page.
- Synergy Research Group. Cloud market shows no sign of slowing, with Q4 revenues up by thirty percent. srgresearch.com. Quarterly tracker covering infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and hosted private cloud. Q4 2025 worldwide revenue $119.1 billion; full year 2025 $419 billion; Q4 share Amazon 28%, Microsoft 21%, Google 14%, top three 68%.
- Amazon.com, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K and quarterly press releases, fiscal year 2025. SEC EDGAR filings. AWS segment sales $35.6 billion in Q4 2025 and $128.7 billion for full year 2025, up 24% and 20% year over year; segment operating income $45.6 billion for full year 2025.
- Microsoft Corporation. Fiscal year 2025 Annual Report and Shareholders Meeting 2025. microsoft.com investor relations, annual reports; FY2025 Shareholders Meeting. Azure surpassed $75 billion in annual revenue, up 34% year over year. Microsoft Cloud, the broader aggregate, surpassed $168 billion, up 23%. Microsoft fiscal year ended June 2025.
- Alphabet Inc. Quarterly press release and prepared remarks for Q4 2025. abc.xyz investor. Google Cloud revenue $17.7 billion in Q4 2025, up 48% year over year; cloud annualised run rate above $70 billion at year end; backlog up approximately 55% quarter over quarter to about $240 billion.
- Oracle Corporation. Investor relations, financial news archive, fiscal year 2025. investor.oracle.com. Q4 cloud revenue, IaaS plus SaaS, $6.7 billion, up 27%; Q4 Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS) $3.0 billion, up 52%. Full year FY2025 Cloud Services and License Support $44.0 billion. Oracle fiscal year ended May 2025.
- Alibaba Group Holding Limited. Quarterly results releases. alibabagroup.com investor relations, quarterly results. Cloud Intelligence Group: March 2025 quarter US$4.15 billion, up 18%; September 2025 quarter US$5.59 billion, up 34%; December 2025 quarter US$6.19 billion, up 36%; AI-related product revenue triple digit growth for consecutive quarters.
- International Data Corporation. Worldwide public cloud spending forecast. my.idc.com. Total public cloud spending projected to surpass $1 trillion in 2026 and approximately double by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate above 21% over the forecast horizon.
- Gartner, Inc. Public cloud end-user spending forecast, as referenced in industry coverage of Gartner's published estimates. Public cloud end-user spending estimated near $595 billion in 2024 and forecast at approximately $723 billion in 2025, an increase of about 21.5%. The Gartner press release archive is the canonical source. gartner.com newsroom.
- NASA Science, Earth Science. Clouds in a Changing Climate, results of the GLOBE Cloud Challenge of 2022. science.nasa.gov. Reported totals for the campaign of 15 January to 15 February 2022: more than 42,700 cloud observations, 89 countries, all 7 continents, more than 7,000 volunteers, more than 108,000 sky photographs, more than 49,450 satellite matches against a goal of 20,000, more than 321,100 CLOUD GAZE classifications, more than 2,000 new GLOBE Observer accounts.
- NASA Langley Research Center. NASA GLOBE Cloud Challenge 2022, Clouds in a Changing Climate, launch announcement. nasa.gov, Langley. Describes the satellite-match goal of 20,000, the use of the GLOBE Observer application and CLOUD GAZE, and the relevance of the Aqua, CALIPSO, Terra, and NOAA GOES-T satellites to the campaign.
- GLOBE Observer. Clouds data and matched satellite data. observer.globe.gov. Defines a satellite match as a ground observation made within fifteen minutes of a satellite overpass, and provides the data access points used by the repository. Confirms the campaign window of 15 January to 15 February 2022.
- GLOBE Observer. The science of clouds. observer.globe.gov, science. Documents the limits of the satellite top-down view, namely difficulty resolving cloud bases, multiple cloud layers, and the cloud and snow distinction, which motivates the ground-based component of the protocol.
- The GLOBE Program. Clouds protocol, atmosphere investigation. globe.gov, Clouds protocol. Defines the sky condition labels Clear, Few, Scattered, Broken, Overcast, Obscured, the cloud genera, the opacity labels Transparent, Thin, Opaque, and the surface condition labels used in the repository's cleaned data.
- Repository data, this project. The committed sample dataset and pipeline code. Sample CSV at data/raw/globe_clouds_2022.csv, cleaned parquet at data/processed/globe_clouds_2022_clean.parquet, schema and quality filters at data/README.md, cleaning logic at src/globe_cloud_insights/clean.py. The figures named in Section II were computed directly from the parquet sample, namely 500 rows after quality filters, sky-condition counts of Broken 97, Clear 90, Obscured 86, Scattered 77, Overcast 75, Few 75, cloud-genera counts of Stratocumulus 95, Altocumulus 91, Cumulonimbus 88, Stratus 82, Cumulus 75, Cirrus 69, opacity counts of Transparent 173, Thin 167, Opaque 160, and surface-condition counts of Snow 138, Dry 136, Ice 116, Wet 110.
- GLOBE Program citation, atmospheric data. Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program. globe.gov. The repository follows the GLOBE Program's recommended citation for any reuse of the cloud observation data.
Compiled by Ruddro Roy from public filings, analyst releases, NASA materials, and the GLOBE Program. The accompanying repository, ruddro-roy / globe-cloud-insights, holds the source of this page, the cleaning and analysis code behind the Section II figures, the Streamlit dashboard, and the build configuration used for publication. Released under the MIT License.