World Community Grid just announced three winners of its contest seeking new climate research projects to support on WCG. These winners get access to the volunteer computing resources of WCG (and Team Gridcoin) as well as access to loads of data from the Weather Company and data storage from IBM.

Here are brief descriptions of the winning projects:

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 projects will be available soon, so keep an eye out for them under "My Projects" on your WCG page!

If you haven't joined World Community Grid yet, now is a great time! World Community Grid and BOINC allow you to donate your computer's spare processing power to boost scientific research on things like cancer, aliens, astrophysics, Zika, prime numbers, clean energy, and climate change. Just think how bored your computer is most of the time and how much fun it would have helping search for cures to childhood cancers.

Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that incentivizes participation in projects like these.

You can learn more about volunteer computing and Gridcoin by looking through my old articles.