The team Codellera Andina, composed of María Fernanda Molina, Nataly Sarmiento, and Isabela Saud, from Geoinformatics Engineering, achieved an important international recognition at the GenHack 4 – Hackathon for Generative Modelling, organized by École Polytechnique (Paris) with the support of BNP Paribas.

The competition brought together more than 270 participants from over 30 countries, forming 60 international teams, and focused on the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, with the goal of improving the downscaling of weather data at the urban scale.

The team’s project addressed a systematic bias in ERA5 maximum temperature (Tmax) over Central Italy, using data from a network of meteorological stations. They developed a simple and interpretable model based on key physical factors such as vegetation, urbanization, distance to the sea, wind, and rainfall, and proposed a transparent correction method to obtain more accurate and decision-ready temperature estimates.

For the quality and clarity of their work, the team was awarded the “Most Meaningful Visualizations Award”, and was notably the only team representing Politecnico di Milano among the winners.

As part of this recognition, the team has been invited to attend the official award ceremony, which will take place on May 5, 2026, in Paris, at the BNP Paribas Millénaire 1 building.

🔗 Project repository:
https://github.com/FernandaMolina22/genhack2025-era5-uhi-team36