Virtual Earth Systems Research Institute (VESRI)

VESRI provides sustained, multi-year funding and embedded technical expertise towards transformational climate modeling research by jointly exploiting advances in models of the Earth systems, Earth observations, computational tools, and bringing tools and approaches from outside the climate sciences to bear within it. VESRI aims to improve climate modeling, change the direction of multiple models globally, and to ultimately accelerate the pace of earth systems and climate research.

Led by a scientific advisory board of world-leading climate scientists, research projects within VESRI were selected from the most promising research proposals arising from Schmidt Sciences’ global, multi-stage competition to address current weaknesses in climate models. Scientific teams submitted innovative proposals that addressed principal shortcomings in current climate modeling – well-known and stubborn biases in the modeling of present-day climate, reliability in the simulation of climate extremes and extreme events, shortcomings in the modeling of past climates, as well as abrupt historical transitions in climate. These are among the aspects of the climate system that continue to challenge our models in terms of resolution, fidelity, complexity of representation, and teasing apart the roles of natural and forced variability. From this global competition we selected four highly innovative, transdisciplinary, and cross-national research projects traditionally not supported through current funding agency structures.

Schmidt Sciences leverages its philanthropic model and technical expertise to fund and coordinate high-impact, high-risk research that falls outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. Through VESRI, we coordinate hundreds of climate and data scientists across eleven countries, four scientific research consortiums and fifty research institutions to tackle some of the most difficult scientific and computational problems in climate modeling. Further accelerating VESRI is the Schmidt Sciences-funded Institute of Computing for Climate Science (one of four Virtual Institute of Scientific Software (VISS)) at the University of Cambridge, which advances climate sciences through computer science, software engineering, data science, and AI. Through these efforts, VESRI seeks to drive large-scale, catalytic, and transformative impact in climate modeling.

Schmidt Sciences creates Virtual Institutes of Science where a distributed network of carefully selected scientific and technical talent is more likely to solve important problems of scientific knowledge by working across institutions and disciplines than by concentrating the research in a single field or at a single place. This approach allows for high-risk bets that apply new ideas, advanced computing and innovative technologies to STEM R&D.