Utilizing AI for drought prediction
Waterloo co-op student applies machine learning methods to develop tools to forecast drought in Kenya
By Sarah Fullerton
Faculty of Science
Rising temperatures and intensifying drought continue to worsen with the global climate crisis. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 55 million people worldwide are affected by drought each year — a number expected to grow as climate change becomes more extreme.
Through the power of artificial intelligence (AI), Andrew Watford, a fourth-year Faculty of Science student at the University of Waterloo, is addressing this challenge by developing more accurate and interpretable tools for forecasting drought.
As part of his co-op term in the Mathematical Physics program and his stellar promise as a researcher in the field, Watford was afforded the opportunity to contribute to a peer-reviewed published study on the useof AI to analyze vegetation health and forecast drought patterns in Kenya. The paper compares the performance of a mechanistic model to two physics-informed machine learning approaches.
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