As the Arctic warms at nearly four times the global rate, permafrost – frozen ground that has remained below 0 degrees Celsius for at least two consecutive years – is thawing rapidly, causing widespread ground collapse and infrastructure damage, threatening Arctic communities and releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
To date, while vast amounts of high spatial and temporal resolution data has been collected, real-time analysis of permafrost thaw has been limited, far behind the speed in which data is produced. New research by Wenwen Li, professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University, aims to support the development of a new, open-access resource that will use satellite data and artificial intelligence technology to make it possible to track Arctic permafrost thaw in near real time. The project, led by the Woodwell Climate Research Center and funded by a $5 million grant from Google.org, will use AI technology to streamline the data analysis process and make it easier to rapidly identify patterns and trends in permafrost thaw datasets.
“This is an exciting era of AI and geospatial sciences,” said Li, whose research uses AI to explore new questions about the geographic world. “Leveraging them to understand the ever-changing Earth’s environment and its climate — such as Arctic warming, excessive heatwaves and increasingly occurring disasters — offers a real chance for us as a society to better combat climate change, mitigate its impacts and plan for a more sustainable and resilient future.” The three-year effort — an expansion of the Permafrost Discovery Gateway — will focus on building automated workflows for geospatial product creation, AI models capable of identifying changes, patterns and trends, and environmental and climatic drivers. It will also focus on building tera to petabyte scale permafrost thaw datasets.
