Climate change is beginning to impact infrastructure, transportation systems, energy, food, water supplies and human health, with Africa and Asia being two of the most vulnerable regions to the impacts of climate change. However, these impacts are often difficult to quantify, especially in regions where ground-based economic surveys occur infrequently.

For climate adaptation and resilience planning, information is needed on vulnerable infrastructure such as transmission lines, water systems, food supply chains and transportation networks as well as climate hazard exposure to severe weather, fires, floods and the consequent damage. Building on the work of previous teams, this team will create a “foundation model” to enhance climate change mitigation and adaptation planning that can be used to monitor a broad range of climate change contributing factors and impacts.

A foundation model is a model (usually a deep neural network) that has been trained on a large and diverse set of data, after which it can be adapted to a variety of related inference tasks. Historically, the development of foundation models has required access to massive quantities of labeled imagery. However, recent research has shown that effective foundation models can be developed without any hand-labeled imagery using self-supervised learning. 

This project team developed a novel approach utilizing embedding space and zero-shot learning to combat the challenges above. The team’s models did not need extensive training, and provided a high level of accuracy. These results demonstrated the potential of this approach as a cost-effective, efficient solution for analyzing remote sensing imagery, which can be replicated in many different regions. 

Read more about this team’s work by reading their team profile.

Timing

Summer 2023 – Spring 2024

Team Outputs

AI Meets Satellite Imagery: A New Strategy for Monitoring Climate Change (Team profile; 2024 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Virtual Showcase)

Tracking Climate Change Using Satellites and Artificial Intelligence (Research poster; 2024 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase)

Tracking Climate Change Using Satellites and Artificial Intelligence (Lightning talk; 2024 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase)

This Team in the News

Meet the Winners of the 2024 Bass Connections Student Research Awards

See related Climate+ summer project, Tracking Climate Change Causes & Impacts With Satellites and AI (2023), and earlier related team, Tracking Climate Change With Satellites and Artificial Intelligence (2022-2023).

Image: Kangerlussuaq Glacier, Greenland, by European Space Agency, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0