Climate Analytics Lab

The Climate Analytics Lab aims to reduce uncertainty in the role of anthropogenic aerosol on the climate by exploiting recent advances in machine learning to enable improved projections and gain new insights from observations.

Project Highlights

JAX-GCM

A fully differentiable climate model enabling ML-enhanced climate science and gradient-based optimization.

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GAIA Initiative

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

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ClimateBench

A benchmark dataset for the emulation of full-complexity climate models.

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News

• 26/06 - 🎉 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
• 25/12 - UC San Diego launches GAIA, a new initiative combining AI with Earth and ocean science, co-led by Duncan. UC San Diego Today
• 25/10 - 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!
• 25/04 - 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.
• 25/03 - 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!! 🎉

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• 26/06 - 🎉 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
• 25/12 - UC San Diego launches GAIA, a new initiative combining AI with Earth and ocean science, co-led by Duncan. UC San Diego Today
• 25/10 - 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!
• 25/04 - 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.
• 25/03 - 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!! 🎉
• 25/01 - 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 🎉
• 24/11 - New research in Science which uncoverd a new mechanism of cloud reduction through aerosol pollution was highlighted in UCSD Today!
• 24/10 - Our research on the climate impacts of recent shipping emissions changes on the record breaking temperatures of 2023 was discussed in Science.
• 24/10 - LaKeta Kemp joined CAL this year as a Data Science PhD student with a GEM Fellowship. Welcome LaKeta!
• 24/03 - “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.
• 24/03 - 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.
• 23/12 - 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!
• 23/10 - The Climate Analytics Lab held our inaugral group meeting today - with cupcakes!
• 23/08 - 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.
• 23/02 - After a 5400 mile move with his family, Prof. Watson-Parris takes up his position at Scripps and HDSI in UC San Diego!
• 22/11 - 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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