SS05 – Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Geosciences
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Mon-29 Jun 2020 | 16:00 – 18:00 | Tower D, Emerald Axel TIMMERMANNIBS Center for Climate Physics, Pusan National University “Dealing with Big Data in Climate Research” |
Climate research has made major advances over the past decade. Climate models now include more components, such as vegetation, chemistry, marine biogeochemistry. Furthermore, thanks to the advances in supercomputing, future climate change simulations can now be run at unprecedented horizontal and vertical resolutions. Data output from these models has increased tremendously, and coordinated model intercomparisons projects (MIPs), or Large Ensemble Experiments can produce datasets of several; up to 30 PB (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 6). Accessing these datasets and extracting interesting science has become a new challenge for climate researchers. In an effort to overcome these challenges, new tools have been developed that gave birth to an entire new research field which combines advanced statistics, ensemble analysis techniques and methods of dynamical systems’ analysis. My presentation will highlight some examples, that illustrate the power of such techniques in making sense of Petabytes worth of climate model data, while at the same time providing key information about the future evolution of the earth system to policymakers and the general public. I will also comment on the fact machine learning has had a relatively slow start in climate research. Towards the end of the presentation I will sketch several ideas how various non-parametric methods can be applied in future to large climate datasets, in order to improve deeper understanding of physical processes and dynamics.
Biography
Axel Timmermann conducted his PhD research at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany and received his PhD in Meteorology in 1999 from the University of Hamburg. After 2 years as a postdoc in the Netherlands and 3 years as research team leader at the IfM-GEOMAR/University of Kiel, Germany he moved to the University of Hawaii to work first as an associate professor and then from 2009-2016 as a full tenured professor at the International Pacific Research Center and the Department of Oceanography. In January 2017 Dr. Timmermann became the Director of the new IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University, where he also holds a Distinguished Professorship.
In 2008 Axel Timmermann received the prestigious Rosenstiel Award in Oceanographic Science for his fundamental contributions to ocean science. In 2015 he was awarded the University of Hawai’i Regents’ Medal for Research Excellence and in the same year he also became a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. In April 2017 Prof. Timmermann received the Milankovic Medal from the European Geosciences Union in 2017 for his contributions to paleoclimate research. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed articles (9 in Nature, 3 in Science) on subjects ranging from Quark-Gluon Plasma, relativistic hydrodynamics, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, glacial cycles, abrupt climate change, climate prediction, human migration, biooptics and dynamical systems’ theory. Axel was listed in 2018 and 2019 as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics. For his contributions to communicate climate research to the general public, Prof. Timmermann was awarded the “Scientist of the Year” award by the Korean Science Journalist Association.