Please join us for a special seminar presented by Elizabeth Barnes, Ph.D. The seminar series will help build the research community in climate science in the New School Focused on Climate and Sustainability.

The seminar will be in-person in Y2E2 300, Thursday, April 28 at 3pm, followed by a Q&A until 4:30pm. There will not be a hybrid option, but the talk will be recorded for those in the Stanford community who cannot attend in person. 

Elizabeth A. Barnes, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Dept. of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

Explainable AI for Climate Science: Detection, Prediction and Discovery

Earth’s climate is chaotic and noisy. Finding usable signals amidst all of the noise can be challenging: be it predicting if it will rain, knowing which direction a hurricane will go, understanding the implications of melting Arctic ice, or detecting the impacts of human-induced climate warming. Dr. Barnes will demonstrate how explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques can sift through vast amounts of climate data and push the bounds of scientific discovery. Examples include extracting robust indicator patterns of climate change and identifying Earth system states that lead to more predictable behavior weeks-to-years in advance. But machine learning models are only as capable as the scientists designing them. Dr. Barnes will discuss how the future of climate science requires that we fully embrace data science as an integral part of the field. This will support the crafting of domain specific XAI methods, both to gauge the trustworthiness of the XAI’s predictions, but also to uncover predictable signals we did not know were there. Explainable AI can open doors to scientific understanding — supporting scientists as we ask entirely new questions about the coupled human-Earth system.