Weather/Climate Lead for India’s Mission to Mars Joins ClimateAi as a Senior Scientist
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Nov. 24, 2020 — ClimateAi, the leading climate resilience platform for agriculture, announced this week that Chandra Kishtawal is joining the rapidly expanding company. Kishtawal will fill the newly created role of senior scientist to lead new efforts in forecasting extreme risks in short- to medium-term time frames.
Kishtawal comes to ClimateAi with over two decades of expertise in climate forecasting. Previously, he served as the group director in the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Division in the Indian Space Research Organization, where he led the weather and climate team responsible for India’s successful mission to Mars, among other space missions.
“The Indian Space Research Organization is one of the most innovative and successful space agencies in the world, with a stellar track record of space missions in the last decade, including India’s Mars mission,” said Himanshu Gupta, CEO of ClimateAi.
“Chandra’s ability to lead and deploy the climate forecasting for such high-stake and high-impact missions will help us create more value for customers in the food and agriculture sector, where both lives and billions of dollars are at stake due to climate risks.”
Kishtawal has been widely recognized for his innovative use of machine learning techniques in weather prediction algorithms. His high-level weather prediction algorithms have proven effective at simulating patterns in cyclones, tropical storms, hurricanes, and monsoons for various terrains around the world. He also has more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
“Climate change, on one hand, is a major challenge of our time, but on the other hand, it opens up several new opportunities,” Kishtawal said. “Working for several years in weather and climate research and applications, I was always fascinated by the complex and interesting ways the natural processes interact with each other. ClimateAi focuses on the use of advanced machine learning resources to understand and unravel these patterns, which leads to real-world applications in areas such as agriculture, food security, and energy. ClimateAi provides the right environment where a climate scientist like me can work along with experts in AI, data science, and management to find solutions and opportunities in a changing climate.”
ClimateAi won an NSF grant earlier this year for its innovative machine-learning approach to forecasting — a breakthrough new way to predict weather compared to conventional models. ClimateAi’s team has doubled the size of its team in the past 3 months as the company has grown with regards to its number of customer partners.
About ClimateAi: ClimateAi is on a mission to accelerate climate resilience. ClimateAi provides customizable tools for decision-makers in the agricultural sector to make farming more profitable and food systems more resilient by bringing climate forecasting and agronomics into the age of machine learning. Its breakthrough forecasting models can create place-based, crop-specific, and industry-focused predictions for anywhere from two weeks to one year to 50 years out. Learn more: http://climate.ai/
