“If we can better understand how clouds are impacting climate change and improve the accuracy of our climate models, we can save lives.”

From driving trains on the London Underground to searching for life on Mars, 2020 Schmidt Science Fellow Jacqueline Campbell has followed an unconventional and interdisciplinary path.

Now, she’s turning her gaze to the clouds, utilizing decades of discarded satellite data to unlock their role in our changing climate.

Discover Jacqueline’s interdisciplinary journey in our latest We Are Schmidt Science Fellows film.

Jacqueline’s fascination with space began in childhood, but it was a glimpse of Saturn through a powerful telescope that helped turn her curiosity into a scientific career.

Today, her focus has shifted from exploring other worlds to protecting our own.

Clouds can have both warming and cooling effects on our planet. Some trap heat, while others reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the Earth.

Understanding how these effects balance out is crucial to improving climate predictions.

Jacqueline is finding answers in an unlikely place, the petabytes of data that other scientists have discarded.When clouds obscure satellite images of Earth’s surface, those images are often treated as unusable.

But at Asterisk Labs, which Jacqueline co-founded, she and her colleagues are using AI to unlock this vast historical record.

Their ambition is to reveal how clouds have changed over time and improve predictions of their future behavior.

Schmidt Science Fellows enabled Jacqueline’s interdisciplinary pivot from astronomy into Earth science, helping her apply her expertise to challenges with direct consequences for people and the planet.

Building on this interdisciplinary approach, Jacqueline is now leading Earth Compress, a £7 million ARIA-funded project through Asterisk Labs in partnership with the UK’s National Oceanography Centre.

The project aims to make vast environmental datasets more accessible to researchers, opening up new possibilities for scientific discovery.

Gazing out into the vastness of space has had a profound impact on Jacqueline’s life and career, shaping the way she sees our own planet.

“We’re never going to find anything as perfect as we’ve got here. So we really need to take care of it.”