Cambridge Science Festival – Climate Modeling Interactive Experience

If the Earth’s mean temperature rises by 2.5 degrees C (4.5 degrees F) in 2069, how much warmer will it be in Boston? Anchorage? Beijing? Sao Paulo?… What kind of policies could mitigate these increases? In MIT’s Grand Challenge: Bringing Computing to Climate, we’ve developed programs which can enable you to run a fast and accurate version of a climate model in seconds. To design policy scenarios, we collaborate with Climate Interactive and their En-ROADS platform.

Join us to model your own climate scenarios! You can examine how your choices affect future temperature and rainfall, and zoom in on your favorite locations across the globe.

Come by any time to experiment! Every hour on the hour, we’ll talk about the science behind how we developed this fast model, which we call an “emulator”, which provides accurate results in seconds on a laptop, rather than the weeks or months on supercomputers it typically takes to run a climate model.

Visualize ocean circulation patterns on the 3-D iGlobe! See the new MIT model for ocean currents visualized on a physical sphere and learn how the new programming language, Julia, and GPUs are revolutionizing climate modeling.

About the Organizer

Glenn Flierl is Professor of Oceanography in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. His interests include modeling the physics, chemistry, and biology of strongly nonlinear ocean eddies and meandering jets, such as the Gulf Stream, which meander around their average paths with wave-like features having many different scales and periods, with resulting nonlinearities playing a significant role in the dynamics. He uses various analytical and numerical models to analyze the dynamics of features such as vortices in vertically and horizontally sheared flows, and the interactions between waves and vortices, and makes comparisons to recent observational studies.