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http://www.cs.washington.edu/events/colloquia/
Please join the eScience Institute today, March 5, at 4:30 pm in the Bill and Melinda Gates Commons (CSE 691). Pizza at 4:15 PM.
Chris Bretherton, Professor, (UW Departments of Atmospheric Sciences and Applied Mathematics):
Big Data meets Big Models: Weather Forecasting and Climate Modeling’
Big models and big data have long been a fixture of weather and climate modeling. Computer-generated global weather forecasts are initialized from millions of diverse observations from satellites, weather balloons, surface weather stations, ships and buoys. As we will describe, data assimilation, the process of optimally blending these observations into the forecast model, is the most computationally challenging aspect of making a global forecast, and is a critical element of forecast skill. Climate models are like weather forecast models, but run out tens to thousands of years with fuller treatment of earth system processes like ice, biology, and chemistry, generating enormous archives of model output. The international climate modeling community has evolved interesting infrastructure and social institutions that enable a diverse community of interested users to obtain standardized results from leading climate models developed around the world, to capture aspects of climate modeling certainty and uncertainty and help inform decision-makers and the interested public.
Biography:
Chris Bretherton is an atmospheric scientist who studies cloud formation and turbulence and improves how they are simulated in global climate and weather forecast models. His research includes participating in field experiments and observational analyses, three-dimensional modeling of fluid flow in and around fields of clouds, and understanding how clouds will respond to and feed back on climate change. Computer code developed by his research group for simulating cloud formation by atmospheric turbulence is used in the two leading US climate models. He was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, Chair of a 2012 National Academy report entitled A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling, and a former director of the University of Washington Program on Climate Change. In 2012, he received the Jule G. Charney Award, one of the two highest career awards of the American Meteorological Society.