Climate Modeling

Refining Climate Predictions

The technology behind climate models was first created 50 years ago. Much has changed since then, and there is now an opportunity to make use of the latest advances in supercomputing, modern programming languages, and machine learning to improve climate models and enable more certain projections of local trends of average and extreme temperature and precipitation change in our rapidly warming climate. We're building modern machine learning (ML) into current climate models to improve their performance in key areas and ultimately to refine climate change predictions. Our ML is trained on ultra-realistic ‘digital twin’ simulations of the Earth’s atmosphere that exploit the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Better Climate Models using Finer Grids

In the same way photos have become clearer because screens now pack in more pixels, fine grid ‘global storm resolving models’ (GSRMs) based on grids with less than 5 km (3 miles) horizontal spacing and 50 or more vertical grid levels spanning the depth of the atmosphere) can now provide a detailed and actionable ‘digital twin’ of our world, enabling realistic simulation of airflow around mountain peaks and within thunderstorm systems that generate much of the world’s most intense rainfall.

GSRMs are currently too costly to run for more than a year or two, so they are not yet practical for climate modeling. An earlier AI2 Climate Modeling project team pioneered the use of a domain-specific language (DSL) for making a GSRM run more efficiently on modern high-performance computers using diverse hardware accelerators such as GPUs, while still presenting developers with elegant, understandable, maintainable code. This project was transitioned to NOAA and NASA partners at the end of 2022.

Smarter, More Accurate Simulations with Machine Learning

Present-day GSRM simulations can be leveraged to increase the accuracy of currently affordable global climate models by training machine learning (ML) to replace their less accurate components—something that has never been done in operational climate models before. We partner with a leading climate modeling center, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) using their X-SHiELD GSRM, a modified version of the U.S. global weather forecasting model, to design new GSRM simulations and create ML training datasets across multiple climates. Our group is a world leader in this area.

Create Open-Source and Collaborative Solutions

We're developing open-source software so the broader climate modeling community can easily adopt our advances. Our partnership with GFDL ensures our work builds on their valuable experience and has the quickest impact. This collaboration brings our team’s innovation together with GFDL’s climate modeling experience and computing resources to achieve quicker impacts that can set an example for other climate modeling centers.