High above the valley in California’s wine country, Joanna Wells’ vineyard is a challenging place to grow grapes. It’s nearly 3,000 feet above sea level, atop a mountain ridge, “Forty minutes off a main road just to get there,” Wells says.
But it’s these rocky hilltop terrains, with plenty of sunshine and maritime breezes, that Wells says, are perfect for the job.
What’s not idyllic, though, is California’s extreme weather.
“Every year tends to be climatically extreme now.”
She’s just one of a growing number of ventures, small and large, that are on the front lines of extreme weather.
To adapt to the shifting moods of climate change, Wells and her vineyard are turning some of their attention to the power of machines. Soil monitors and rain gauges were already in place at the vineyard when she took over the operation eight years ago.
But what wasn’t there was the machine-learning component – the software that allows the operation to crunch data “in a way that now gives us this predictive aspect that we didn’t have in the past.”
Artificial intelligence alerts to smoke on a fire camera screen at the PG&E Hazard Awareness Warning Center (HAWC) in San Ramon, Calif., on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022. The HAWC is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to monitor a broad range of natural disasters, including wildfires, land movement, earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding and avalanche hazards.
Jane Tyska / Getty Images
Researcher Rossella Arcucci and her team at Imperial College in London are developing software applications that take in huge amounts of information about a fire, everything from wind speed to what people are tweeting about it, to come up with predictive analyses of how to respond.
“You can start simulating what happens if I put a (fire) barrier here, or a barrier there. Is the firefront moving in a different way? Am I able to stop the wildfires (by taking these measures)?”
That kind of predictive analysis is also helping with shipping in the Arctic – including for cruise ships that are increasingly navigating the region’s waters.
