Guest post: How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science

The extensive evidence feeding into the report includes observations collected from across land, ocean and atmosphere, as well as numerous simulations from the latest generation of climate models. However, in recent years, climate scientists have another tool available to them thanks to rapid advances in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and, particularly, machine learning. In contrast to models that follow a set of explicit and pre-defined rules, machine learning aims towards building systems that can learn and infer such rules based on patterns in data. As a result, a new line of climate research is emerging that aims to complement and extend the use of observations and climate models. The overall goal is to tackle persistent challenges of climate research and to improve projections for the future.