Title: Trends in Earth System Modeling and Emerging Data Science Opportunities
Abstract: The talk reviews recent trends in Earth System Modeling and connects them to emerging data science opportunities. In particular, the talk will survey the latest high-resolution and variable-resolution modeling trends, which include the developments of statically-nested and adaptively-moving meshes in the fluid dynamics component (the `dynamical core’) of weather and climate models. These variable-resolution techniques provide refined grid spacings in areas of interest, and even allow scales down to the kilometer regime in the selected areas. Such resolutions are often computationally too expensive for the global domain, but are needed to reliably represent many weather extremes, such as tropical cyclones or severe thunderstorm systems. Severe weather events will be used as a physical motivator throughout the talk. We will discuss how the design of weather and climate models as well as the analysis and use of model and observational data can be informed by modern statistical and data science techniques, such as stochastic physical parameterizations or machine-learning approaches.
Biography
Christiane Jablonowski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan, and the head of the Atmospheric Dynamics Modeling Group. Her research lies at the interface between atmospheric fluid dynamics, applied mathematics and scientific computing. In particular, her work focuses on the fluid dynamics component (the “dynamical core”) of weather and climate models. She advances the frontiers of multi-scale Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) and variable-resolution modeling techniques that can selectively zoom into areas of interest. In addition, Dr. Jablonowski is the lead founder of the Dynamical Core Model Intercomparison Project (DCMIP).
Dr. Jablonowski is the recipient of a Department of Energy Early Career Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She is the co-chair of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) ‘Atmospheric Model Working Group’ and a scientific advisory board member for the ‘Climate Change Science Institute’ (CCSI) at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Prior to joining the faculty she was a postdoctoral researcher at NCAR and NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL).
