VUB climate software praised in Time's best new inventions list

Brussels' Dutch-speaking university VUB has been rewarded for groundbreaking software with the potential to fight climate change.

The artificial intelligence software programme MeteoSaver has been included in the Time Magazine best inventions special mentions of 2025, a list of the most influential inventions of the year.

According to the university, the software, developed by VUB researcher Derrick Muheki, shows how important technology can be in combating climate change. By completing historical temperature data with the software, blind spots in climate change can be eliminated.

Within the BCLIMATE research group, led by VUB research professor Wim Thiery, Muheki uses machine learning to automatically convert handwritten weather logs into digital datasets.

Scientists can now take a photo of a weather log from the past. The program processes the photo itself and converts it into structured spreadsheets that can be analysed, shared and stored safely.

“In this way, MeteoSaver helps to protect vulnerable data that is otherwise at risk of being lost due to time, floods or fire,” VUB said.

To evaluate the software, in summer 2023, Muheki went to the Yangambi department of the National Institute for Agronomic Research in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He scanned more than 9,000 pages of historical weather logs from the region during his stay.

“Seeing how fragile these paper archives were made me realise how urgent this work is. Just months before my visit, part of the archive had been damaged by fire. We could have lost decades of irreplaceable data,” explains Muheki.

Muheki is currently analysing more than 900,000 digitised observations from fieldwork in the Congo Basin. For example, he wants to understand better how local weather extremes, such as drought and heatwaves, have developed under human-caused climate change.

Climate scientist and VUB professor Thiery is convinced that the software will open new doors: “Climate models are only as good as the data we feed into them. With MeteoSaver, we can finally close long-standing data gaps and improve our understanding of regional climate change, particularly in areas that have historically been overlooked.

“By digitising and sharing archives, we are effectively returning valuable data to the countries they came from and to the global scientific community.”

The MeteoSaver software is open source and can be used free of charge by anyone in the world. There are already partnerships growing with many institutes, including the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMIB) and the University of Reading, UK.

The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in the Netherlands is testing to apply MeteoSaver to historical archives preserved there.

Muheki agrees that the recognition by Time magazine “means that MeteoSaver will gain more visibility, helping us in our quest, and many others’, to rescue essential weather records around the globe. Even in the Global North, we are also sitting on incredibly rich archives that still need to be unlocked.”