Climate Analytics Lab

We're hiring!

Applications are open for Postdoctoral Researchers in AI for Climate Science on the MOSAIC project, using agentic AI to discover better climate-model parameterizations.

Position details & how to apply

Interested in joining the lab? Current opportunities for postdocs, prospective PhD students and current UC San Diego students, and how to apply, are on our Join the Lab page.

Research

Project Highlights

All projects

MOSAIC

Discovering interpretable climate-model equations from observations with symbolic AI.

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JAX-GCM

A fully differentiable climate model for hybrid ML and gradient-based optimization.

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GAIA Initiative

Harnessing AI to understand, forecast and steward Earth’s complex systems.

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ClimateBench2

A probabilistic benchmark for physics-based, data-driven and hybrid climate models.

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Latest

News

• Jun 2026
  🎉 It’s official! Our paper on JAX-GCM, unlocking true differentiability for the future of climate modeling, has been accepted! Read about the project here
• Dec 2025
  UC San Diego launches GAIA, a new initiative combining AI with Earth and ocean science, co-led by Duncan. UC San Diego Today
• Oct 2025
  New papers: Jorge Baño-Medina recently published three excellent papers building large ensembles of AI weather models, their use for attribution, and how well they represent atmospheric physics. It was a pleasure working with him on them!
• Apr 2025
  Our new paper “Integrating Top‐Down Energetic Constraints With Bottom‐Up Process‐Based Constraints for More Accurate Projections of Future Warming” has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
• Mar 2025
  Congratulations to Zoe Ludena, Eric Pham, and Ylesia Wu for winning the best Capstone Project award at the 2025 UCSD Data Science Showcase! Read more about their ‘SeeRise’ project here and interact with their app here. Well done!! 🎉

Show all news

• Jun 2026
  🎉 It’s official! Our paper on JAX-GCM, unlocking true differentiability for the future of climate modeling, has been accepted! Read about the project here
• Dec 2025
  UC San Diego launches GAIA, a new initiative combining AI with Earth and ocean science, co-led by Duncan. UC San Diego Today
• Oct 2025
  New papers: Jorge Baño-Medina recently published three excellent papers building large ensembles of AI weather models, their use for attribution, and how well they represent atmospheric physics. It was a pleasure working with him on them!
• Apr 2025
  Our new paper “Integrating Top‐Down Energetic Constraints With Bottom‐Up Process‐Based Constraints for More Accurate Projections of Future Warming” has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
• Mar 2025
  Congratulations to Zoe Ludena, Eric Pham, and Ylesia Wu for winning the best Capstone Project award at the 2025 UCSD Data Science Showcase! Read more about their ‘SeeRise’ project here and interact with their app here. Well done!! 🎉
• Jan 2025
  PI Watson-Parris was awarded an NSF CAREER award exploring “The Large-scale Buffering of Shallow Cloud Perturbations”. We’re excited to start this new project, which will focus on understanding the role of shallow clouds in the climate system and their response to anthropogenic perturbations 🎉
• Nov 2024
  New research in Science which uncoverd a new mechanism of cloud reduction through aerosol pollution was highlighted in UCSD Today!
• Oct 2024
  Our research on the climate impacts of recent shipping emissions changes on the record breaking temperatures of 2023 was discussed in Science.
• Oct 2024
  LaKeta Kemp joined CAL this year as a Data Science PhD student with a GEM Fellowship. Welcome LaKeta!
• Mar 2024
  “Multi-Fidelity Residual Neural Processes for Scalable Surrogate Modeling” has been accepted to ICML 2024! It introduces a novel multi-fidelity neural process and apply it to climate projections - generating a temperature projection of ERA5 out to 2100. The paper is available on arXiv.
• Mar 2024
  Prof. Watson-Parris gave a talk at the 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Denver on the use of Generative AI for Climate Science. It was covered by ACM.
• Dec 2023
  The Climate Analytics Lab had a great time at AGU 2023! We gave two invited talks, presented a poster on AerChemMIP2 and had a great lunch with Andrew Ng to discuss AI for climate. We’re looking forward to AGU 2024!
• Oct 2023
  The Climate Analytics Lab held our inaugral group meeting today - with cupcakes!
• Aug 2023
  Prof. Watson-Parris is quoted in a Science article describing the climate impact of recent changes in shipping fuel regulations. Read more about the project here.
• Feb 2023
  After a 5400 mile move with his family, Prof. Watson-Parris takes up his position at Scripps and HDSI in UC San Diego!
• Nov 2022
  Our recent Nature Climate Change paper is featured in this Wired article highlighting that “Tiny Aerosols Pose a Big Predicament in a Warming World”

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