Big Data and climate research
Author
Beatrice Huber
NRP 75 “Big Data”
Not only NRP 75, but also other players in Switzerland use data analysis and big data for domain sciences. With this article we would like to refer to the Blog of the Swiss Data Science Center and especially to one post that explores the interaction between climate science and data science in a project that is complementary to the NRP 75 “Can a combination of theory and Big Data better predict extreme weather impacts?” project.
Climate scientists prepare long-term calculations for the development of the climate in the future. They use models based on the current scientific understanding of the climate system. In contrast, predictions based on Big Data are largely “theory-free”. In the NRP 75 project researchers try to find out under which conditions and for which questions in climate research big data approaches are particularly promising. In their paper “Applying big data beyond small problems in climate research” (published in February 2019) they argue that one of the biggest potentials for big data research lies in socioeconomic research questions. A good example for that is climate impact research.
The blog post “climate is what you expect, weather is what you get” published on the SDSC website addresses similar issues at the intersection between climate science and data science.
“The climate is constantly changing and we need to continue developing robust methods to identify more and more accurately the causes and drivers of the changes that we are observing.”
The relationship and interaction between domain-specific knowledge and data science is explored in a synergistic project DASH – Data Science-informed attribution of changes in the Hydrological cycle, currently ongoing in a collaboration between the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC) at ETH, the Seminar for Statistics at ETH and the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC). The authors of the blog post, Eniko Székely from the SDSC and Sebastian Sippel from IAC in Prof. Reto Knutti’s Climate Physics’ group (who is the PI of the NRP 75 project), argue that “when studying changes in the climate, it is relevant to both predict these changes and to identify their causes.”