Machine learning for weather and climate are worlds apart

Modern weather and climate models share a common heritage, and often even components, however they are used in different ways to answer fundamentally different questions. As such, attempts to emulate them using machine learning should reflect this. While the use of machine learning to emulate weathe...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Watson-Parris, D
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: The Royal Society 2021
Description
Summary:Modern weather and climate models share a common heritage, and often even components, however they are used in different ways to answer fundamentally different questions. As such, attempts to emulate them using machine learning should reflect this. While the use of machine learning to emulate weather forecast models is a relatively new endeavour there is a rich history of climate model emulation. This is primarily because while weather modelling is an initial condition problem which intimately depends on the current state of the atmosphere, climate modelling is predominantly a boundary condition problem. In order to emulate the response of the climate to different drivers therefore, representation of the full dynamical evolution of the atmosphere is neither necessary, or in many cases, desirable. Climate scientists are typically interested in different questions also. Indeed emulating the steadystate climate response has been possible for many years and provides significant speed increases that allow solving inverse problems for e.g. parameter estimation. Nevertheless, the large datasets, nonlinear relationships and limited training data make Climate a domain which is rich in interesting machine learning challenges.