Microsoft Unveils Climate Research Initiative

Maintaining a balance on planet Earth is essential to guarantee our survival, as a species, and that is something that we are having a hard time understanding.

Most of the processes carried out in the world follow guidelines similar to those defined during the industrial revolution, more than 100 years ago, when there was not the slightest care for the environment. We didn’t do it out of malice, we did it out of ignorance. We couldn’t imagine that the actions of human beings could affect something as big as a planet.

And in reality the planet cares little what we do. The Earth has already suffered much in the past and will suffer again in the future, but it will recover. The problem is that this new cycle can be carried out without any life on its surface, as has surely already happened on Mars.

The fact is that little by little we are waking up to this new reality, and the big technology companies are doing a lot for this issue.

Now it’s Microsoft’s turn, a company that just launched the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative (MCRI), a community of multidisciplinary researchers working together to accelerate cutting-edge research and transformative innovation in climate science and technology. climate.

Thanks to this initiative they will be able to make considerable progress on three critical points:

– Overcome the limitations for decarbonization.
– Reduce uncertainties in carbon accounting.
– Assess climate risks in more detail.

In their presentation they indicate:

Researchers will offer transdisciplinary and diverse expertise, particularly in areas beyond traditional computer science, such as environmental science, chemistry, and a variety of engineering disciplines. All results of this initiative are expected to be made public and freely available to drive even broader research and progress on these important climate issues.

Bringing together researchers from various branches will help to better analyze global climate challenges, not only by relying on Microsoft’s computational capabilities, but also with the experience of collaborators.

Several points will be worked on, such as understanding the change in CO2 emissions from the measurement of gas concentrations, something essential to follow the progress in real time of carbon reduction actions. Currently these observations are very limited, so a novel method combining atmospheric numerical modeling and machine learning will be carried out.

From WWWhatsnew we will closely follow the progress to publish them as they are disclosed.