AICE Speaker Series: Baylor Fox-Kemper (Brown University)

Please join us for the next AICE Speaker Series with Baylor Fox-Kemper, Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, Brown University.

AGENDA
3:00pm – 3:45pm: Presentation
3:45pm – 4:00pm: Q&A
4:00pm – 4:30pm: Reception

Data Science Institute, Room 105
5460 S University Ave, Chicago, IL 60615

Title: Emulators and Parameterizations: Indirect Tools for Climate Science

Abstract: As Earth system models grow in complexity and computational cost, two approaches offer opportunities to accelerate progress and deepen understanding: parameterizations and emulators. I will distinguish these two strategies in a practical way. Focusing on the ocean, I’ll discuss an emulator that is a key path to quantifying regional mixed layer depth (MLD) affects climate sensitivity, connecting surface mixing processes to the spread in model projections of climate change. By combining observations with this emulator, we attribute about 40% of uncertainty in projected climate sensitivity to processes leading to MLD biases. I’ll also show how an emulator (the energy balance model–Kalman filter: EBM–KF) can do many things we struggle to do with climate models. It assimilates global surface temperature and ocean heat content to generate rapid, probabilistic projections and allows efficient exploration of policy thresholds, internal variability, and the impact of external forcings like volcanic eruptions. A final emulator example is the ISEFlow ice sheet emulator which allows projections of the ice sheet contributions to sea level rise. This emulator has been trained against ice sheet resolving models from the ISMIP6 project, and it is changing our assessments of how sensitive ice sheets are to climate change. I’ll close with some of our plans for emulators in Narragansett Bay–this ongoing work will allow us to do coastal modeling–with applications to coastal resilience, pollutant transport and fate, hypoxia, and other environmental concerns–more efficiently and open up new evaluation techniques.

Bio: Baylor studies the physics of the ocean and how the ocean fits into the Earth’s climate system, using climate models, satellites, and autonomous observations. In 2013, Baylor joined the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University, after working in other roles at the University of Colorado, Princeton, NOAA, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and MIT. He co-led the Ocean, Cryosphere, and Sea Level Change chapter of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Physical Science Basis (WGI) Report, and he is presently co-chair of a World Climate Research Program Core Project on Earth System Modelling and Observations.

At Brown, Baylor works mainly within the Oceans, Ice, and Atmospheres Research Group. He is the STEM faculty director of the Equitable Climate Futures initiative, an elected fellow of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES), an affiliated faculty member of the Brown Theoretical Physics Center, the Brown Center for Fluid Mechanics, and the Initiative for Sustainable Energy, and he supports the SciToons and Vis-A-Thon programs. He is also an associate editor of Science Advances and a JASON.

His Ph.D. is from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography, working with Joe Pedlosky (at WHOI) and Paola Rizzoli (at MIT). In his pre-oceanographic career, I trained in physics at Reed with Nick Wheeler and at Brandeis with Stanley Deser and X.-J. Wang.