CliMA in the News

Techniques used in weather forecasting can be repurposed to provide individuals with a personalized assessment of their risk of exposure to COVID-19 or other viruses, according to new research published by Caltech scientists.

We’re thrilled to celebrate this year’s seven Education and Research winners of the Google Cloud Customer Awards.

The second annual Google Cloud Customer Awards program honors organizations that have succeeded in turning new ideas into realities. Google experts independently judged and scored an unprecedented number of submissions from around the world. Winners in education and research demonstrated innovative thinking and inspirational digital transformation using Google Cloud products and solutions.

Climate issues are politically polarized in the United States, but that’s not the only reason it’s been difficult to curb global warming, says Raffaele Ferrari, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

Today, a new climate model is being developed by CliMA, a group of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians from Caltech, MIT, the Naval Postgraduate School, and JPL. This next-generation climate model integrates aspects of existing models with extensive data about Earth gathered by satellites and other instruments.

If scientists can create a new way to predict climate change – making it as accurate as, say, forecasting the weather – it would help people make everyday decisions: how high to build a sea wall or what crops to plant.

Seeding the atmosphere with aerosols would not prevent high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from destabilizing low-lying clouds, opening the door to extreme warming.

Crocodile bones, 50 million years old, have shown up on the Arctic island of Ellesmere, and that’s a problem. Scientists have been unable to explain how the Arctic could have warmed up enough to host those tropical creatures.

Tapio Schneider, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and professor at Caltech, thinks the answer may lie in the clouds.

When it comes to climate modelling, every computational second counts. Designed to account for air, land, sun and sea, and the complicated physics that links them, these models can run to millions of lines of code, which are executed on the world’s most powerful computers. So when the coder-climatologists of the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) — a coalition of US-based scientists, engineers and mathematicians — set out to build a model from the ground up, they opted for a language that could handle their needs. They opted for Julia.