How machine learning could help to improve climate forecasts

Mixing artificial intelligence with climate science helps researchers to identify previously unknown atmospheric processes and rank climate models. Many of the latest climate models seek to increase the detail in simulations of cloud structure. As Earth-observing satellites become more plentiful and climate models more powerful, researchers who study global warming are facing a deluge of data. Some are now turning to the latest trend in artificial intelligence (AI) to help trawl through all the information, in the hope of discovering new climate patterns and improving forecasts. "Climate is now a data problem," says Claire Monteleoni, a computer scientist at George Washington University in Washington DC who has helped to pioneer the marriage of machine-learning techniques with climate science.