Challenges and future prospects for climate modeling

There have been great increases in climate model skill in the last decade across a swathe of important areas. Yet there are still persistent biases and common assumptions that limit their utility at local or regional scales despite the growing demand for such information for adaptation and building climate resilience. I will discuss the paths forward to increase climate model utility, including new data analytics capabilities, greater inclusion of new processes, and the use of machine learning. I will also discuss the observational gaps and theoretical limits that will modulate any future progress – regardless of improvements in computational ability.

About the speaker: Gavin Schmidt is the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and was the acting Senior Climate Adviser to the NASA Administrator in 2021. He currently works on the simulation of climate in the past, present, and possible futures and has over 150 peer-reviewed publications. He was the author with Joshua Wolfe of “Climate Change: Picturing the Science” in 2009, and in 2011 was the inaugural recipient of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Climate Communication Prize. He is a fellow of the AGU and American Association for the Advancement of Science and his 2014 TED Talk on climate modeling has been viewed over a million times.

A recorded presentation of the NASA JPL Center for Climate Sciences Distinguished Climate Lecturer Series.