Cloud Solution to Help Military Engineers to Cope with Climate Change

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Since 2017, Microsoft’s AI for Earth project has been providing cloud-based tools and artificial intelligence services to organizations working on changing the way they monitor, model and manage Earth’s natural systems. 

Due to intensifying climate changes, militaries around the world could be overstretched as they respond to more intense and frequent climate-driven crises and threats to their own installations. So modeling the risk of extreme weather and natural disasters along the US coastline is critical to the US Army.

The Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) is working with Microsoft to improve climate modeling and natural disaster resilience planning through the use of predictive analytics-powered, cloud-based tools and artificial intelligence services. 

Under a new agreement, ERDC will test the scalability of its coastal storm modeling system, CSTORM-MS — which was previously run on high-performance computers — inside Microsoft’s Azure Government cloud.

The CSTORM-MS models can give coastal communities a robust, standardized approach for determining the risk of future storm events and for evaluating flood risk reduction measures caused by tropical and extra-tropical storms, as well as wind, wave and water levels. 

Currently, CSTORM-MS models are run at ERDC’s Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center. 

After initial successful testing with Microsoft’s Azure cloud, the second phase of the project will demonstrate how well Azure can run CSTORM-MS’ entire North Atlantic Coast storm suite, which features a sea-level rise value not previously simulated. The agreement will also allow researchers to use the model results and replicate the workflow on other affected coastlines, according to defensesystems.com.