27/03/2026
Our planet is a dynamic system and we are only beginning to understand how fast it is changing 💡
From wildfires and storms to shifting oceans and changing climates, the systems we depend on are constantly in flux 🔥
The question is: how can we see those changes earlier and understand them better?
For the past few years, scientists and engineers at Frontier Development Lab (FDL) have been exploring how AI can help, by bringing together researchers from AI, Earth science, and engineering to tackle real planetary challenges.
In 2026, that work takes its next step 📈
This year’s research is gathering a new set of research challenges:
🌍 Mixture of Earths: leveraging on the explosion of foundation model capability, this challenge will develop a novel adaptive switch-out system to produce a transparent, uncertainty-aware estimate of Earth systems as a Mixture of Experts, addressing critical gaps in areas like carbon reporting and land use.
🌳 Living Forest: building a complementary multi satellite AI foundation model focused specifically on global forests and biomass, this challenge aims to understand how the Earth’s living systems function and how they respond through the lens of carbon capacity, resilience, and ecosystem dynamics.
🌀 Tropical Cyclone Thermodynamics: addressing the gap in predicting rapid storm intensification, this challenge will create a novel multimodal AI model that fuses 3D cloud morphology with temperature, precipitation and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) wind speeds for the first time.
If you're a PhD or postdoctoral researcher interested in working at the intersection of science, AI, and real-world impact, applications are open to join FDL Earth Systems Lab 2026.
🔗 Apply here: https://eslab.ai/apply
Know someone who would be a great fit? Feel free to share or tag below.
🤝 ESA - European Space Agency | Scan Computers UK
