Advances in Climate Informatics: Accelerating Discovery in Climate Science with Machine Learning

Abstract:

Despite the scientific consensus on climate change, drastic uncertainties remain. The climate system is characterized by complex phenomena that are imperfectly observed and even more imperfectly simulated. Climate data is Big Data, yet the magnitude of data and climate model output increasingly overwhelms the tools currently used to analyze them. Computational innovation is therefore needed.

Machine learning is a cutting-edge research area at the intersection of computer science and statistics, focused on developing algorithms for big data analytics. Machine learning has revolutionized scientific discovery (e.g. Bioinformatics), and spawned new technologies (e.g. Web search). The impact of machine learning on climate science promises to be similarly profound.

The goal of the novel interdisciplinary field of Climate Informatics is to accelerate discovery in climate science with machine learning, in order to shed light on urgent questions about climate change. In this talk, I will survey my research group’s progress in the emerging field of climate informatics. Our work includes algorithms to improve the combined predictions of the IPCC multi-model ensemble, applications to seasonal and subseasonal prediction, and a data-driven technique to detect and define extreme events.