Kathryn Koenig

Project: Is Climate Change Changing Clouds?

Mentors/Lab: Ian Foster, Michael Maire, Elisabeth Moyer, Rebecca Willett/RDCEP

Research Area Keywords: Biology & Environment // Image Analysis // Machine Learning

My work during the program centered on climate science: because clouds introduce uncertainty into climate projections, our project uses unsupervised machine learning methods to evaluate changing cloud characteristics. In my contribution to the project, I tackled the data processing issues brought on by immense but previously under-utilized NASA satellite data: through employing web scraping and API calls as well as mapping and other data visualization techniques, I simplified and expedited the data downloading and wrangling process.

Project News: Two papers arose from this research, and both were accepted to the American Geophysical Union Fall 2019 meeting: “Cloud Characterization With Deep Learning II” and “Developing Unsupervised Learning Models for Cloud Classification.”