The Big Data in Atmospheric Physics (BINARY) project at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has been granted EUR 1.5 million in funding by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. The basic idea of this interdisciplinary project that unites atmospheric physics and computer science is to apply state-of-the-art methods of statistical data analysis and machine learning to various scientific problems in atmospheric physics. Researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and the Institute of Computer Science at JGU are involved. The project was launched in March 2020 and is coordinated by Professor Peter Spichtinger from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics. "At JGU, we have excellent conditions for cooperation between the two disciplines of atmospheric physics and computer engineer vs computer science. Over the past few years, we have increasingly carried out joint interdisciplinary research, also involving our students,"
Thanks to improvements in measurement technology and enormous increases in computing power, atmospheric physics - like many other natural sciences - has seen a huge increase in the amounts of data. However, analyzing these data using conventional methods has become difficult or even impossible. At the same time, our understanding of the intricate physical processes that occur in the atmosphere is still relatively poor as this is a highly complex system in which processes take place on many different scales - from the formation of microscopic ice crystals in the air to the development of thunderstorms. Indeed, many of the fundamental processes are still not fully comprehended while their effects on the system as a whole remain unclear.
