Ed Gerber

Ed Gerber

Professor at the Courant Institute

Why is Rome so much warmer than New York?

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While Rome and New York receive the same amount of energy from the sun (being situated at the same latitude), the former experiences a much warmer climate, particularly in the winter months. This is due to large variations in the atmospheric flow with longitude, known as “stationary waves”. It has long been known that these variations are generated by differences between land and sea, topography, and variations in sea surface temperatures. But just how do these different components add up to produce our climate?

In The building blocks of Northern Hemisphere wintertime stationary waves, just submitted to the Journal of Climate, we probe the nonlinear interactions that set the zonal structure of our climate. This study was lead by Chaim Garfinkel at Hebrew University Jerusalem, in collaboration with Ian White, Martin Jucker, and Moran Erez.

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See the forest and the trees!

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Congratulations to Dave Connelly, who just submitted his first paper! It is about the use of regression forest to represent atmospheric gravity wave momentum transport to JAMES! The manuscript makes two important steps forward. First, it shows that a “boosted forest” approach, where you train each subsequent decision tree on the residual (as sketched below), can out perform a “random forest” where you combine a number of decision trees, averaging the result. This was well known in the ML community, but less so in the climate sciences. Second, Dave found that techniques from interpretable AI could be used to improve the training of a data driven parameterization. Using feature importance metrics, he found that his origional boosted forest wasn’t using enough information about latitude. By forcing the method to predict the latitude as well, he could build trees that incorporate this information more effectively!

The graft-versus-host problem…

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Ofer Shamir just submitted a paper on the use of machine learning to represent atmospheric gravity wave momentum transport to QJRMS. He developed an idealized, one-dimensional model of the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, where we could systematically compare different data-driven methods. In particular, how can one calibrate a data-driven scheme to work in a biased model (the graft-host problem), and how well can schemes generalize to new conditions, as in a climate change scenario?

Um, what happened to me?

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I flatter myself to think you may have stopped by my webpage over the last year and half and wondered, what happened to Ed? No new papers? No research? Did he drop off the face of the Earth? Sort of. I was on sabbatical at Free University Berlin and Ludwig Maximillian University, Munich for an academic year!