Distinguished Seminar in Computational Science and Engineering

April 3, 2025, 12-1PM

45-432 in Building 45 and Zoom Webinar

AI for weather & climate physics applications: Advances from planetary to km-scales. 

Mike Pritchard
Director, Climate Simulation, NVIDIA Research & Professor, Earth System Sciences, University of California, Irvine 

Abstract: 

AI has rapidly changed the paradigm for simulating atmospheric dynamics from planetary to storm-resolving scales. In the first part of this talk I will review how a deterministic global AI weather model developed at NVIDIA has been re-calibrated for probabilistic prediction to generate huge ensemble counterfactuals of historical heat waves, relevant for climate risk calibration to low likelihood / high impact event exposure. Next, I will review emerging NVIDIA research technologies based on generative AI – for (i) spatial downscaling and new channel synthesis, (ii) its extension to ambitious domain sizes via a patch-based multi-diffusion approach, (iii) the advent of AI for dynamical downscaling and mesoscale forecasting and (iv) the promise of generative data fusion. I will conclude with some remarks on the exciting potential for end-to-end AI forecasting systems that portend a more interactive and computational efficient paradigm for simulating atmospheric and climate physics.