Leveraging AI to Make Climate Models More Accurate and Useful | Raffaele Ferrari | TEDxBoston

complex system. 1. Are climate models today adequate for humanity to respond to climate change, 2. If they are not, can we do better?, and 3. Is the information generated from these models useful in forming effective responses? Dr. Ferrari explores fascinating correlations between previously ignored conditions, such as cloud cover, and their at times quite significant impact on planetary temperatures and extreme weather events. I am a physical oceanographer interested in the circulation of the ocean, its interaction with the atmosphere and climate. I use a combination of observations, theory and numerical models to investigate all oceanic motions from scales of centimeters to thousands of kilometers.

I got interested in oceanography while a physics major at the University of Torino in Italy. I so much enjoyed applying physics principles to explain the world around us that I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in physical oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (La Jolla, CA). After a short postdoc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, MA), I arrived at MIT (Cambridge, MA) in 2002. Here I have fun investigating the physics of the ocean, atmosphere and climate with the exceptional students and postdocs that come to MIT. It is very rewarding to apply physics principles to understand one of the defining scientific questions of our time: the inner workings of Earth’s climate.

I am a faculty of the MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science Department, Director of the MIT Program of Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate, and a member of the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Physical Oceanography and the MIT Climate Modeling Initiative. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx