Data–Pop Alliance has been conducting ongoing research on Big Data, climate change and environmental resilience. With funding from the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), we published a synthesis report evaluating the opportunities, challenges and required steps for leveraging the new ecosystem of Big Data and its potential applications and implications for climate change and disaster resilience. The report fed into the World Humanitarian Summit to be organized in Istanbul in May 2016.

This is the sixth podcast in a series of companion pieces that offer insights from the synthesis report.

This companion podcast to the synthesis report “Big Data for Climate Change and Disaster Resilience: Realising the Benefits for Developing Countries,” was funded by UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) was designed to probe experts to speak more about their work and their ideas about the potential and challenges of Big Data.

Titled “Friederike Otto & Mamun Rashid on CPDN, Climate Modeling, and Extreme Weather,” this podcast features two experts: Friederike Otto and Mamun Rashid. Friederike speaks about the importance of involving communitites in the process of tapping Big Data for climate change resilience–from the creation of the data, to analyzing, to representing, and understanding the data–thus increasing the impact the analysis can have on the ground. Mamun points to three necessary requirements for effective results of Big Data analysis: quantified data, a good analysis model, and the right computing infrastructure to efficiently analyze the data.

Friederike Otto (@FrediOtto)

Friederike Otto is a senior researcher in the Environmental Change Instititute (ECI) at the University of Oxford and leads and coordinates the distributed computing climate modelling project climateprediction.net. Her main research interest is on extreme weather events, improving and developing methodologies to answer the question ‘whether and to what extent external climate drivers alter the likelihood of extreme weather.’

Mamun Rashid (@CPDN_BOINC)

Mamun Rashid is a Scientific Research Computing Specialist working in climateprediction.net (CPDN) project at the University of Oxford. The project runs climate models on people’s home computers to help answer questions about how climate change is affecting our world. He is involved in infrastructure development and deployment for a large number of climate extreme event set analysis for World Weather Attribution (WWA) project.

For more on our series: