Hair Of The Dog: Technology for Climate Modelling

You can’t rely on reading tea-leaves for solving the present and upcoming concerns of climate change. With all the data centres, factories, e-waste and supply chains that technology weighs down the planet with, it only makes sense to use the problem, itself, as a solution. But it would take more than a hair-cut here.

- Pratima H

Take a guess on this. Who is the world’s best meteorologist? Is s/he sitting in some supercomputing facility? Or hovering above us in some satellite? Well, turns out this expert is busy singing on some tree in a busy forest. What’s Birdsong to us can be a complex and data-rich algorithm altogether in the world of these tiny creatures that are fluttering and chirruping their own codes. Take the Veeries from the forests of Northern US and Southern Canada. They are the best in the industry when it comes to predicting the Atlantic Hurricane season – thanks to their breeding patterns. Veeries have been observed to stop breeding early when the storms are earlier than expected. You watch them and you can get warnings – early enough.

In other parts of the world, in the Urban concrete jungles, computers of all sizes and stripes are trying to match up to sparrows and butterflies – in predicting hurricanes and other such events where fast action matters. Armed with swift attention and early alerts, humans can be better equipped to handle many Climate incidents.

Climate models and technology-backed intuition are trying to do just that.

IT TAKES GUTS

The most interesting and beautiful use of our homegrown PARAM supercomputer could not have been any better – in this vein. It has been busy in taking a ‘guess’ but driven with supercomputing gut-feel. Anuman, which has been jointly developed by CES and VC & BA groups of C-DAC Pune, has been created to give hour-to-hour weather forecast over 50000 locations all over India using high-resolution weather model output – and it’s all generated using C-DAC’s National PARAM Supercomputer.