Artificial intelligence and supercomputing to predict extreme weather events

What if you could tell where the next big flood will hit or which region might be devastated by a drought? Could an artificial intelligence (AI) model be used to predict which forest area was most at risk from potentially catastrophic fires?

Advances in supercomputing and artificial intelligence mean this will soon become a reality. Earth Visualizations Engines, or EVE, is gathering all the data we collect to enable governments and private citizens to mitigate the effects of climate change.

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The EVE Summit in Berlin is bringing together 180 of the world’s top climate scientists from 29 different nations to try and do just that.

“EVE is an effort to try to bring the most powerful technologies to solve the biggest problems. More specifically, it’s a way to bring computing and artificial intelligence to scale to help people understand what it really means to them climate change,|” Bjorn Stevens, a climate scientist who is the driving force behind the summit, told CGTN.

Relying on a computer program to predict extreme weather events and the impact of climate change may seem like turning science fiction into scientific fact, but it also comes at a steep price. To do it right, it will cost about $2.5 billion a year, but Stevens says it means potential savings of trillions of dollars.

“If we create massive amounts of information about possible climate futures and you want a tool to summarize that, like predicting the 15 major floods over the next 100 years according to these models in one area, that would help visualize that,” Stevens explains.

“So it’s really a family of AI and visualization tools that would live on this layer of data to help people imagine possible and plausible futures.”

“Innovate better and reduce risk”

Chinese participation is fundamental to the project. Wang Yi, vice chairman of China’s national climate change expert group, is also a keynote speaker at the EVE summit. He told CGTN that working together to tackle climate change is essential.

“Cooperation is very important because what we are facing is a global challenge, which means we need to take joint action. I think there is no common future without cooperation, so we need this kind of cooperation,” said Wang.

“This can motivate us to innovate better and reduce our risks.”

Chinese technology is also at the forefront of weather mapping and forecasting.

Zhou Tianjun, deputy director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says he can give large-scale systems like EVE the data they need on a global scale.

“Chinese Huawei has now developed a Pangu forecasting system, which is used for weather and marine weather forecasting. And China’s Fudan University has recently launched a forecasting system called Fuxing, which can predict the climate for the next 15 years. It has surpassed the world at present,” Zhou told CGTN.

Gathering this data and knowing where places are at risk is vital in the growing list of threats we face.

According to the United Nations, if global temperatures rise by about 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, we will see a five-fold global increase in floods, storms, droughts and heat waves.

To take action to reverse the effects of global warming, it can be crucial to identify which areas are most at risk.

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