SEAS Colloquium in Climate Science (SCiCS)

Thursday, February 4, 2016
Room 214 Mudd

“Why do climate models differ?”

Abstract: In this talk, I will cover sources of diversity in climate models. We will look at the process of model development at different institutions and show how many factors: including history and culture, scientific priorities, community of users, developers and “customers”, and computational constraints, play a role in defining a climate model. We will explore how this may evolve in the future.

Biography: Dr. V. Balaji has an M.Sc. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the Ohio State University. With his background in physics and climate science, he has become an expert in the area of parallel computing and scientific infrastructure. Dr. V. Balaji has headed the Modeling Systems Group at NOAA/GFDL since 2003, with an appointment in Princeton University’s Cooperative Institute on Climate Sciences, and Associate Faculty at the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE). He was recently appointed co-chair of the WGCM Infrastructure Panel (WIP), tasked with developing the scientific requirements for the global data infrastructure underlying the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a pillar of the IPCC Assessment Reports of the state of the Earth’s climate. He was an author on the 2012 NRC Panel report “A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling”. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, as well as for DOE’s Accelerated Climate Modelingfor Energy (ACME) Project, and NCAR’s Computing and Information Systems Lab (CISL). He is a sought-after speaker and lecturer and is committed to provide training in the use of climate models in developing nations, leading workshops for advanced students and researchers in South Africa and India.

Host: Aditi Sheshadri <[email protected]>