Climate Modeling and Analysis

The main avenues through which machine learning can support climate science, as described in .

The first global warming prediction was made in 1896, when Arrhenius estimated that burning fossil fuels could eventually release enough CO2 to warm the Earth by 5°C. The fundamental physics underlying those calculations has not changed, but our predictions have become far more detailed and precise. The predominant predictive tools are climate models, known as General Circulation Models (GCMs) or Earth System Models (ESMs). These models inform local and national government decisions), help people calculate their climate risks (see Policy, Markets, and Decision Science and Climate Change Adaptation) and allow us to estimate the potential impacts of solar geoengineering.

Recent trends have created opportunities for ML to advance the state-of-the-art in climate prediction. First, new and cheaper satellites are creating petabytes of climate observation data. Second, massive climate modeling projects are generating petabytes of simulated climate data. Third, climate forecasts are computationally expensive (some simulations have taken three weeks to run on NCAR supercomputers), while ML methods are becoming increasingly fast to train and run, especially on next-generation computing hardware. As a result, climate scientists have recently begun to explore ML techniques, and are starting to team up with computer scientists to build new and exciting applications.

Background Readings

Some textbook length introductions to climate science include,

• Introduction to climate dynamics and climate modeling

Other resources include,

• An Introduction to Climate Modeling, a video lesson from Climate Literacy's Youtube channel

Community

Journals and conferences

Climate science is a journal field. Noteworthy research appears in journals such as the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Geophysical Research Letters and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Societies and organizations

• AGU
• Climate Informatics

Past and upcoming events

• AGU Fall Meeting 2020

Libraries and Tools

Pangeo supports open source scientific python for geoscience applications.

• Pangeo also maintains a list of packages useful for atmospheric, ocean, and climate science.

Data

The largest climate prediction datasets are ensembles of many climate simulations. These include simulations with varied physics, architectures, or initial conditions, and they are used to explore the range of possible climate futures. The largest ensembles include:

• The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)
  • CMIP is associated with the Earth System Grid Federation, which also provides data analysis tools and tutorials: https://esgf.llnl.gov/
• The CESM Large Ensemble,
  • Read about it in The Community Earth System Model (CESM) Large Ensemble Project
• Google Cloud Weather and Climate Datasets
  • Petabyte-scale weather and climate datasets from sources like NOAA’s NEXRAD and NASA/USGS’s Landsat, made available for free as part of Google Cloud’s Public Datasets Program.
• earthdata.nasa.gov

N.B. Climate model data is typically presented in netcdf4 format. These may be smoothly converted to csv files or pandas dataframes, but be aware that the data lies on irregular 3D spherical grids.

The Earth and climate science community is also working to create benchmark datasets: https://is-geo.org/benchmarks/.