Climate X Uses AWS to Project Climate Risks with Trillions of Data Points

Founded in 2019, Climate X created the climate risk analytics software Spectra to project the impact of climate change and extreme weather events—such as floods, subsidence, and heatwaves—on assets, businesses, and people worldwide. Climate X securely provides this data to customers in the financial and real estate sectors so that they can make climate-resilient investments and safeguard their assets.

Climate X works with petabytes of data to create its projections, so it relies on high-performance computing and storage space. Spectra was designed and built on AWS because of its confidence in the compute power and scalability of AWS. As Climate X brought Spectra from proof of concept to release in 2021, its infrastructure on AWS scaled every step of the way, supporting high-velocity usage by some of the world’s largest institutions.

On AWS, Climate X gained the compute power to work quickly and efficiently on a pay-as-you-go basis. For example, when the team wanted to model hurricanes using the Monte Carlo simulation technique, it was calculated that the simulation would run in 100 days on a single virtual machine. By using AWS ParallelCluster, an open-source cluster management tool, the team scaled projections horizontally and reduced runtime to 3 days. “If it was going to take 100 days, we would have thought, Is this worth it?” says Dr. James Brennan, director of climate risk modeling and R&D at Climate X. “But if it takes 3 days, we can say, ‘Go for it!’”

By 2021, Climate X began assessing climate risks in the United Kingdom, requiring over 1 trillion data points. Now, it uses more than 500 trillion data points to provide risk insights for more than 1.5 billion assets across North America, Western Europe, and Asia–Pacific. To provide consistent performance as it grew, Climate X adopted Amazon FSx for Lustre, a fully managed, high-performance file system. The platform moved from proof of concept to production in 3 months. “The ability to store what we consider an almost unlimited amount of data is very important,” says Andrew Ellam, vice president of technology at Climate X.

Climate X gained valuable data for its simulations by participating in the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), which provides free access to scientific data that can otherwise be difficult for climate researchers to use. ASDI also provided Climate X a cloud grant, which is given to customers who use AWS technology to solve long-term sustainability challenges. “Without the ASDI grant, we would be spending more time on fundraising and less time building the product for our customers,” says Ellam.

On AWS, Climate X scaled its infrastructure in pace with the enormous number of data points it collects and translates into risk assessments for its customers. The team is now working to develop new scenarios, increase the number of hazards it tracks—such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions—and expand to more regions.

“The scalability is there; the reliability is there,” says Ellam. “We don’t need a dedicated platform team. There’s always an AWS service for whatever we need, and we know that it will be reliable.”