(Image by Rafael Edwards)Brazilian researchers are completing the development of a climate prediction tool that could revolutionize the world by showing climate trends for the next few decades.
The initiative called the Tupã project aims to develop a technological tool capable of integrating past, present, and future climate data, offering a new perspective on forecasting climate events and their variations.
The innovative technology is being developed at the Federal University of Fluminense (UFF), in collaboration with Engie Brasil Energia, as part of the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel) program, and the Euclides da Cunha Foundation (FEC).
According to project coordinator Ana Luiza Spadano, professor of geology and geophysics at UFF, the lack of extensive historical series of climate data is a major challenge in forecasting, she told Xinhua. In Brazil, for example, records rarely exceed 80 years.
“The Tupã project highlights the capacity of Brazilian science to contribute significantly to the advancement of climate science and underlines our active role in the search for sustainable solutions to global challenges,” Spadano said.
According to the interviewee, Tupã aims to develop advanced software that will allow Engie’s engineers to search and integrate a wide range of climate data.
This tool will provide detailed analysis to support strategic climate decisions in specific regions of the country, helping to ensure greater certainty in resource planning and the management of risks associated with climate change.
“We are building a tool for the operator to look at climate trends over long time scales. In other words, instead of looking at precipitation patterns in a basin over the last 50 years, you can look at trends in precipitation variability over the last 21,000 years, verify those same trends with instrumental measurements over a few dozen years, and also simulate the future based on the results of numerical models,” he added.
According to Spadano, “the Tupã software combines all this information and thus greatly increases the decision-making capacity”.
According to the coordinator, the project is in the final stages of interpreting regional climate variability, using the analytical tools developed to produce diagnostics that will help Engie make decisions related to energy production. It is expected to be completed in June this year.
“This tool will help energy operators understand the likelihood of prolonged droughts or excessive rainfall in certain regions. For example, if the government decides to build a hydropower plant, the software will help predict the likelihood of water being available for power generation in that region based on past, present and future. The same is true for wind power,” he concludes.