Multi-university collaboration will use data science to find the next El Nino

Hurricane Harvey, shown in 2017. A new data project hopes to sniff out weather patterns. The El Nino and La Nina patterns in the Pacific Ocean are notorious for their long-distance effects on weather as far away as Africa and the Midwestern United States. But climate experts also know of several other such patterns, known as teleconnections, and believe that there are many more to be discovered. The new TRIPODS Climate project, a collaboration among the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Irvine, will develop novel data science tools to sniff out these hidden patterns, improving weather forecasts and scientific understanding of global climate.