Climate Researchers Enlist Big Cloud Providers for Big Data Challenges

And the shift hasn't gone unnoticed by the Big Three cloud providers. AWS and others offer subscription-based remote data storage and online tools, and researchers say they can be an affordable alternative to setting up and maintaining their own hardware. The cloud's added computing power can also make it easier for researchers to run machine-learning algorithms designed to identify patterns and extract insights from vast amounts of climate data, for instance, on ocean temperatures and rainfall patterns, as well as decades' worth of satellite imagery. "The data sets are getting larger and larger," said Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon.com Inc. "So machine learning starts to play a more important role to look for patterns in the data."