Summary



After a rigorous review of dozens of applications from all over the world, we're excited to announce the research groups who will receive supercomputing power, weather data, and cloud storage from IBM to accelerate climate change science.



As our planet faces the mounting impacts of climate change, scientists are on the front lines of understanding complex consequences and developing solutions.

We've heard from climate change scientists that common bottlenecks they face include limited access to weather data, and insufficient computing power and data storage capacity to accurately simulate the impacts of climate change.

These are some of the reasons why IBM Corporate Citizenship recently invited scientists to apply for grants of massive computing power from World Community Grid, meteorological data from The Weather Company, and data storage from IBM Cloud Object Storage to support their climate change or environmental research projects. (More information about these IBM resources can be found here.)

As a result of this call for proposals, we received more than 70 responses from researchers all over the world. We're thrilled to announce the winners of these resources:

Impact of climate change on public health (Emory University, USA)

This project will examine the impact of climate change on temperature and air pollution at local levels, helping researchers understand the impact of a changing climate on human health.

Impact of atmospheric aerosols on climate change (Far Eastern Federal University, Russia)

Atmospheric aerosols, such as dust, smoke and pollution, both absorb and reflect sunlight in the atmosphere, and represent the greatest area of uncertainty in climate science today, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This project aims to determine how super-micron particles (6 to 12 micrometers in diameter) interact with sunlight and how they contribute to atmospheric temperatures--information that will improve the accuracy of climate models.

Rainfall modeling in Africa (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)

In Africa, agriculture relies heavily on localized rainfall, which is difficult to predict. In collaboration with the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory, which aims to develop a vast network of weather stations across Africa, researchers will simulate rainfall on the continent. Such information could help farmers be more resilient, among other weather and hydrology applications.



These proposals were evaluated by IBM scientists and an outside team of experts for scientific merit, potential to contribute to the global community's understanding of specific climate and environmental challenges, and the capacity of the research team to manage a sustained research project. Researchers also agreed, if they received these resources, to abide by our open data policy by publicly releasing the data from their collaboration with us.

In the coming months, we'll be updating everyone as we get ready to launch these projects. In the meantime, current World Community Grid volunteers who want to support these projects as soon as they start can go to the My Projects page to opt in to new projects as they become available.

If you’re not yet a World Community Grid volunteer, you can sign up to be notified as soon as the first of these three projects is launched. You can also join World Community Grid right now and support our existing projects.

Thanks to everyone for your support and stay tuned for further news!