Ed Gerber

Ed Gerber

Professor at the Courant Institute

Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Our commentary for the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, “Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of our Own”, was just accepted for publication. It follows on a nice paper by Zhihong Tan, Orli Lachmy, and Tiffany Shaw that recently appeared in the same journal.

We make the case that models of simpler atmospheres – which are distinct from simple models of our atmosphere – can help us understand the circulation response of our atmosphere to global warming, and enable us to build better climate prediction models!

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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!