The Woodwell Climate Research Center in the U.S. announced that it has received a $5 million in grant funding and a Fellowship from Google.org, the tech company's philanthropic arm.
The funding is aimed to support the development of a new, open-access resource that will use satellite data and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to make it possible to track Arctic permafrost thaw in near real-time for the first time.
To-date, real-time analysis of permafrost thaw has been out of reach due to the limitations of remote sensing and satellite imagery analysis. This new resource - an expansion of the Permafrost Discovery Gateway (PDG) - will use AI technology to streamline the data analysis process and make it easier to rapidly identify patterns and trends in permafrost thaw datasets that will be essential to informing climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.
The three-year effort will focus on building automated workflows for geospatial product creation, AI models capable of identifying changes, patterns and trends, as well as environmental and climatic drivers, tera to petabyte scale permafrost thaw datasets.
"Timely tracking of permafrost thaw is critical to assessing impacts and informing action, but current limitations in technology, combined with the rapid pace of change in Arctic landscapes, have held us all back," says Anna Liljedahl, Woodwell Climate associate scientist and project lead. "This project will be groundbreaking in speeding up data analysis and unlocking completely new technological capabilities in how we do science in swiftly evolving landscapes, and, ultimately, what science itself can do."
Theodor Lisovoy, Editor in Chief of the European bureau, Rough&Polished
