Audi of America (AoA) and the Audi Environmental Foundation are awarding a $100,000 grant to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the lead institution in the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA). The grant will fund researchers in their pursuit of a novel new climate model, a critical tool for understanding future global and regional climate patterns.

The new CliMA climate model leverages recent advances in artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and machine learning to generate more precise and actionable projections of future changes in Earth’s climate, such as cloud cover, rainfall, and sea ice extent. Compared to existing models, the goal is to reduce uncertainties by at least twofold.

The new model integrates greater amounts of observational data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a CliMA research partner, and simulates critical small-scale features missed in models that focus on larger scales. This model is intended to be capable of “zooming in” to examine detailed regional information as well.

Source: CliMA

The consortium is pursuing an aggressive timeline, with hopes to have the new climate model running within the next five years. Caltech is working collaboratively with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Naval Postgraduate School; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA. The many partner institutions are bringing different research expertise to the project.

AoA’s collaboration with the Audi Environmental Foundation, headquartered in Germany, is the first of a series of philanthropic initiatives the two organizations will offer to help address the global challenge of climate change and other critical environmental issues.

Audi is committed to reducing CO₂ emissions, first by 30% by 2025, along a path to carbon neutrality by 2050. Since 2009, the Audi Environmental Foundation has been supporting programs that fuse innovation with resource conservation, sustainability, and environmental protection, dubbed “Greenovation”.