Project description
Artificial intelligence for advanced seasonal forecasts
Seasonal forecasts are instruments for climate prediction that help risk prevention related to extreme weather. While recent progress in statistical methods and numerical modelling has improved seasonal forecasts’ performance, their usefulness often remains limited, especially in the mid-latitudes. The EU-funded ARTIST project will improve insights into climate predictability at the seasonal timescale, aiming to increase the performance of existing prediction systems. The project will design a statistical and dynamical hybrid model, synthesising a state-of-the-art dynamical seasonal prediction system and a statistical model relying on advanced machine learning techniques, focusing on the seasonal prediction of temperature extremes in Europe. This hybrid model will combine the theoretical foundation and interpretability of physical modelling with the spatio-temporal predictive relationships identified by artificial intelligence.
Objective
Seasonal Forecasts are critical tools for early-warning decision support systems, that can help reduce the related risk associated with hot or cold weather and other events that can strongly affect a multitude of socio-economic sectors. Recent advances in both statistical approaches and numerical modeling have improved the skill of Seasonal Forecasts. However, especially in mid-latitudes, they are still affected by large uncertainties that make their application often complicated.
The ARTIST project aims at improving our knowledge of climate predictability at the seasonal time-scale, focusing on the role of unexplored drivers, to finally enhance the performance of current prediction systems. This effort is meant to reduce uncertainties and make forecasts efficiently usable by regional met-services and private bodies. A statistical/dynamical hybrid model will be designed through the synthesis of (a) a cutting-edge dynamical Seasonal Prediction System and (b) a statistical model based on advanced Machine Learning (ML) techniques. Such a hybrid approach may become critical to improve climate forecasts, because it combines the theoretical foundation and interpretability of physical modeling with the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that can reveal unknown or disregarded spatio-temporal features.
ARTIST will focus on seasonal prediction of temperature hot/cold extremes in Europe, but its scalable nature can make it applicable across a wide range of variables and geographical areas. Besides the employment of AI, a strength of the action stands in the use of local land surface predictors to instruct the empirical model.
The fellowship, which includes a variety of training activities, will be mainly conducted at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Spain), a world-renowned institute for climate predictions and applications. A secondment period is projected at the Max Planck Institute for BGC (Germany), prominent in land studies and ML employment in earth science.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
08034 Barcelona
Spain