Climate Informatics

Picture 1. WCRP 40th Session Image. From WCRP by N. V. Wel, 2017, https://www.wcrp-climate.org/images/WCRP_conferences/JSC40/images/JSC40header_featurebox.jpg About The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) are group of scientists focused on understanding the climate change. This group differs from CliMA in that WCRP chose to enhance the traditional method of prediction and augment it using machine learning instead of replacing the system from scratch. They host annual meetings with global officials at attendance and provide suggestions to the policy makers on the current state of Earth. References Wel, N. V. (2019, June 18). 40th Session of the Joint Scientific Committee. Retrieved from https://www.wcrp-climate.org/jsc40-about

Personalization The Faceapp is a controversial phone app that manipulates a person’s picture to show how the person would look many years from now (Koetsier, 2019). Controversies aside, it is an interesting app that has sparked an explosive interest from the general population by showing them a personal and likely future of its user. In many ways, Schmidt and his colleagues had a very similar idea in their effort to gain public interest on climate change: show a personal and likely future of its user (Schmidt, et al., 2019). Instead of face, the team used house, and instead of just few years of aging, the team showed the future after 50 years with likely climate change and the related natural disaster in mind (Schmidt, et al., 2019). Figure 1: "Before" and "After" Pictures. From Visualizing the consequences of climate change using cycle-consistent adversarial networks by V. Schmidt, et al., 2019 Conclusion This is a refreshing effort by scientists to nud...

Work of Many The paper “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning” is a comprehensive, cross-discipline overview of the research in climate change and other related fields. This paper sets its scope beyond simply predicting the future and defines a comprehensive role scientists and society should play to address the current and future challenges using machine learning. It divides the current researches and efforts into two categories: mitigation and adaptation (Rolnick, et al. 2019). In mitigation, the efforts are focused on lessening the effects of the climate change, such as changing the energy industry to consume less fossil fuel or building more sustainable cities (Rolnick, et al. 2019). The adaptation, on the other hand, accepts that certain outcomes are inevitable and focuses on technologies that would allow humans to survive, including weather prediction, social infrastructure, and education (Rolnick, et al. 2019). The paper also provides some guidance to prioritizing d...

AI for Earth In the Microsoft blog called “Researchers turn to AI in a bid to improve weather forecasts” by Roach, the author highlights some of the company's contribution to the research that benefits mankind. Through the AI for Earth initiative, the company funds various challenging research projects that studies Earth. The blog also highlights the social activities, such as hackathons, that illustrates some of the current trends of using machine learning to solve difficult problems. References Roach, J. (2019, May 20). Researchers turn to AI in a bid to improve weather forecasts. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/ai-subseasonal-weather-forecast/

The White House is rolling back emission restrictions. From Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science by B. Thibodeaux, 2019, https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/24/us/politics/00dc-cli-trump1/merlin_151256502_8b48e75c-4479-4e89-a186-ae5f913c1c7b-jumbo.jpg Donald Trump Donald Trump is the 45th president with many less than positive traits. As the most powerful man in the most influential country in the world, his views and opinions have a large impact on how the world is shaped. Therefore, it does not help that he lacks common sense on many facets of the world, and his denial of scientific assessment of the climate change is one of many examples. In fact, he claims the term climate change is at least misleading if not a conspiracy theory (Davenport & Landler, 2019). Events Based on the news article by Davenport and Landler, the president elect has played hardline against the pro-environmentalist. For example, not only has he infamously retreate...

Origin The “AI and climate: On the bleeding edge with a pioneering researcher” by journalist Crowder is a dialogue between the journalist and professor Monteleoni. The professor is credited to coining the term, ‘climate informatics’ in 2012 (Crowder, 2018). Crowder interviewed the professor after 6 years to find out more about the new-born field of research and just how much the field has grown since. Picture 1. Professor Monteleoni. From Predictability assessment of northeast monsoon rainfall in India using sea surface temperature anomaly through statistical and machine learning techniques by L. Crowder, 2018. https://thebulletin.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/cmontel-680x1024.jpg In the conversation, the professor described climate informatics as “innovation at the intersection of data science and climate science” (Crowder 2018). This is similar to bioinformatics that became popularized more than a decade ago which combined biological data with data science, and professor...

Background: Data Science Before talking about “AI for Earth observation and numerical weather prediction” by Sid-Ahmed Boukabara, I need to talk a little bit about data science. One of interesting distinction in the data science world is the separation of data and information: the former refers to the raw facts without context while the latter is a processed data to give it a meaning. In another words, raw data is not very useful in that state until it is distilled into information. This distinction formed the foundation of the article by Boukabara, the acting deputy director of the NOAA NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research. Bottleneck Boukabara’s article describes a lop-sided advancement in technology: the human infrastructure to collect data, such as an array of satellites, has far surpassed our ability to process the data in a timely manner. This imbalance is so huge that “only 3-5 percent of satellite observations are actually used in preparing numerical we...

Social Social aspect of the topic covers events or communication aimed towards the general public. The posts in this category consists of various social and political events that pertains to climate change and climate informatics.