Understanding and responding to climate change is a key scientific and societal challenge of the 21st century. Recent advances in satellites and environmental sensors have made it possible to gather vast quantities of data concerning temperature, sea ice, sea level, rainfall, vegetation, etc. There is an urgent need for scientific and technical expertise for developing and effectively applying computational tools that can make use of such data to build increasingly accurate predictive models that offer insights to inform our understanding of, and response to, climate change.
This award supports a series of three workshops on Climate Informatics, an emerging discipline at the intersection of climate sciences and data sciences. The workshops, through a combination of tutorials that introduce climate scientists and data scientists to each other's disciplines, invited talks by established researchers in climate informatics, breakout sessions and for identifying research challenges and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations, serve a critically important role in building a vibrant Climate Informatics research community. The award provides support for the participation of approximately 60 to graduate students in each of the three workshops. The workshops contribute to the education and interdisciplinary training of a diverse workforce in STEM areas that span Climate Sciences and Data Sciences (including Machine Learning, Data Mining, Inference, Decision Making) as well as efforts to broaden the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM research and education. Additional information about the Climate Informatics Workshop Series can be found at: https://sites.google.com/site/1stclimateinformatics/
