Microsoft Azure used to model Earth’s atmosphere for climate aviation project

Microsoft Azure has been described as “vital” in tackling climate change issues, due to its scalability and ability to handle large amounts of data. 

SATAVIA, a Cambridge-based company have used Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to model the earth’s atmosphere, creating a “digital twin” of the atmospheric environment from the ground-level to space.

The company is working towards reducing aviation’s impact on the planet, with the aim to prevent 60% of aviation’s climate impact.

Michael Wignall, Azure Business Lead at Microsoft UK, stated: “Microsoft is committed to tackling climate change across the world; not only through our own actions but by making our tools available to help others reduce human-led impacts on the planet.”

Contrails account for 60% of aviation’s total climate impact, and exert almost twice the emissions aircraft engines release. These are formed from the water vapour from aircraft engines condensing and freezing, trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.

SATAVIA are working towards this reduction through smarter flight planning and the development of DECISIONX, an AI platform which uses weather prediction modelling to generate a high-resolution replica of the Earth’s atmosphere over time.

Through quantifying atmospheric changes such as heat, moisture, pressure and cloud and wind speed, it enables aircraft operators to optimise flight plans by accurately forecasting, avoiding, validating, quantifying and offsetting contrail emissions.

Azure has been described as “Vital” by Dr Adam Durant, SATAVIA founder and Chief Executive Officer, for tackling the issues of aviation impacts on the climate, because of its ability to handle scalability and vast amounts of data.

“We’re delighted to have worked with Microsoft on this test of our ability to scale, demonstrating the incredible scalability and ultra-high performance provided by Microsoft Azure.”

Microsoft and SATAVIA ambitions resonate with one another, with SATAVIA’s vision of increasing sustainability within aviation aligning with Microsoft’s commitments of powering data centres with renewable energy and becoming carbon negative by 2030.

Dr Durant added: “We want to show that we can implement ultra-high-impact applications – like eliminating 60% of aviation’s climate impact with a singly hyperscale platform solution – while simultaneously going carbon neutral or even carbon negative.”