Title: Artificial Intelligence and the 2nd Revolution
in Weather and Climate Prediction
Abstract: Accurate weather and climate predictions are critical for many applications, from early warnings for extreme events to improving resiliency and planning adaptation and mitigation. The current state of the art of weather and climate prediction relies on numerical solutions of the governing equations of the atmosphere, ocean, and other components of the Earth system, and is a result of a slow 50-year scientific revolution. However, the enormous computational cost of the current numerical weather and climate models hinders efforts on reducing the uncertainties in these predictions. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have received significant attention as tools that can help with improving weather and climate prediction and reducing these uncertainties. In fact, for 1-15 day weather forecasting, the AI-based models have shown substantial success in outperforming the numerical models at a fraction of the computational cost. Dubbed the second revolution in weather forecasting, this success suggests that AI can potentially transform the state of the art of climate prediction too, once a number of major challenges are addressed. I will discuss these challenges, and particularly how integrating fundamental concepts and tools from math, climate physics, and computer science need to be integrated to make progress.
Biography: Pedram Hassanzadeh leads the University of Chicago’s Climate Extreme Theory and Data Group and is an Associate Professor at the Department of Geophysical Sciences, Committee on Computational and Applied Math, and Data Science Institute. He received his MA (in applied math) and PhD (working on geophysical turbulence) from UC Berkeley in 2013. He was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at Harvard University before joining Rice University in 2016 and moving to the University of Chicago in 2024. His research is at the intersection of climate change, scientific machine learning, computational and applied math, extreme weather and turbulence physics. He has received an NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, and Early Career Fellowship from the National Academies Gulf Research Program.
The faculty host of this speaker is Dr. Safa Mote