About this Event
21 AMES ST, Cambridge, MA 02139
Toward Answering Some Leading Climate Science Questions by Constraining Models with Observations
Much of climate research is built around climate models for understandable reasons. Yet, as a model developer and user, I see a common fallacy of putting blind trust in models, or in other words, taking model results simply at face value. Climate models are bound to be uncertain in many aspects for good, physical reasons. Furthermore, when models give different answers, the most common response is that we need more models, and let us average them up. Although there is indeed value in ensemble means, I personally do not think that they are the way out especially when many models are closely related. To me, the key to answering many leading climate questions lies in using observations to constrain models. I will use a few of my recently published works to substantiate the claim.
About this series: The PAOC Colloquium is a weekly interdisciplinary seminar series that brings together the whole PAOC community. Seminar topics include all research concerning the physics, chemistry, and biology of the atmospheres, oceans and climate, but also talks about e.g. societal impacts of climatic processes. The seminars take place on Monday from 12-1pm. Contact paoc-colloquium-comm@mit.edu for more information and Zoom password.