SANTA CRUZ — The National Science Foundation recently awarded two UC Santa Cruz researchers with funding for projects that would use artificial intelligence to measure and predict the effects of climate change.
In total, the National Science Foundation has awarded $20 million in funding for 25 projects at universities across the country through the foundation’s Collaborations in Artificial Intelligence and Geosciences (CAIG) program.
“The CAIG program presents an exciting opportunity to address big questions in geosciences research while fostering collaborations between geoscientists and AI experts,” said National Science Foundation Division of Research, Innovation, Synergies and Education Director Wendy Graham in a statement. “All 25 of the CAIG projects will foster transdisciplinary partnerships that lead to innovation in both AI and geosciences. These projects will provide cross-training for AI and geoscience knowledge, significantly building our capacity to study and analyze extreme weather, solar activity and earthquake hazards, among many topics.”
UC Santa Cruz assistant professor of applied mathematics Ashesh Chattopadhyay was awarded about $898,000 for research that would examine ways to use artificial intelligence to generate models of weather and the climate that don’t “hallucinate” or begin showing impossible scenarios for weather predictions further than 15 to 20 days into the future.
Chattopadhyay will work alongside UCSC associate professor of earth and planetary sciences Nicole Feldl and University of Exeter professor of mathematics Geoff Vallis.
“Over the years, we have made significant progress in terms of understanding how these models behave on scientific data, what causes them to fail, and how we can make them work most effectively,” said Chattopadhyay. “This project puts these ideas together to demonstrate our AI-based modeling capabilities at scale for the Earth system and validates it with rigorous physics-based models.”
UCSC professor of astronomy and astrophysics J. Xavier Prochaska and his team were awarded more than $500,000 to fund a collaborative project with UC Davis computer science professor Maike Sonnewald in the university’s Computational Climate and Ocean Group that combines artificial intelligence with massive datasets to better understand ocean dynamics.
“I’m thrilled to receive this award and wish to acknowledge UC Santa Cruz for supporting the Applied AI Initiative, which helped me start a transition into oceanography, and the Simons Foundation for funding the completion of my pivot into oceanography,” Prochaska said in a statement. “With this grant, professor Sonnewald and I hope to accelerate the application of AI in physical oceanography. And, we hope to improve our ability to estimate the heat content of the upper ocean, a quantity which may be heavily impacted by our climate crisis.”
For information about the projects, visit new.nsf.gov.