Computational Climate and Ocean Group

Improving ocean and climate understanding and resilience

We target grand challenges with the aim of improving ocean and climate understanding and resilience. Solutions to the challenges humanity, and the world, face are inherently interdisciplinary, and so is our lab. Blending cutting-edge computational and Earth science tools and knowledge, we combine theory, observations, and numerics to pioneer methods and create insight.

The group focuses on several research areas:

Computational: Injecting knowledge to guide innovation

1. Data mining: Pioneer methods fit for purpose to uncover fundamental insight
2. Sparse data inference: Leverage complicated and messy data
3. AI for science: UQ and XAI for utilizing machine learning as a universal function approximator

Earth Science: Objective advancement of our understanding of the Earth

1. Fundamental insight: Elucidate ocean and climate dynamics
2. Forecasting: Improve predictions on long range weather and climate
3. Resilience: Study impacts on physical and biogeochemical ocean and climate

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News

• 23/09 - New article featuring Prof. Sonnewald on the UC Davis CS department by talented Jessica Heath.
• 23/08 - Documentation for NEMI is now available.
• 23/08 - Will Yik was featured in the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) newsletter! Read it here.
• 23/08 - Yvonne Jenniges gave a well-recieved talk at the Institute for Disease Modeling (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) titled “Towards objective data mining: An example on 3D North Atlantic physical and biogeochemical data”! See project details here.
• 23/08 - Prof. Sonnewald is elected a Faculty Scholar of the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS).

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• 23/09 - New article featuring Prof. Sonnewald on the UC Davis CS department by talented Jessica Heath.
• 23/08 - Documentation for NEMI is now available.
• 23/08 - Will Yik was featured in the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) newsletter! Read it here.
• 23/08 - Yvonne Jenniges gave a well-recieved talk at the Institute for Disease Modeling (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) titled “Towards objective data mining: An example on 3D North Atlantic physical and biogeochemical data”! See project details here.
• 23/08 - Prof. Sonnewald is elected a Faculty Scholar of the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS).
• 23/07 - Will Yik attended and spoke at the Hollings Symposium in Washington DC, right after giving a talk at NOAA-GFDL!
• 23/07 - We recieved $510k from NOAA to study and improve long range forecasts of sea level! I’ll be looking for a postdoctoral scholar/research scientist to start in 2024.
• 23/07 - Prof. Sonnewald joins the UC Davis computer science department.
• 23/05 - Prof. Sonnewald speaks in the AI4Good talk series.
• 23/05 - Prof. Sonnewald is featured in AGU’s “Third Pod from the Sun”.
• 23/05 - Our paper on the Southern Ocean supergyre was published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
• 23/03 - Prof. Sonnewald is featured in a GFDL article on how machine learning can advance climate models.
• 23/01 - Our review paper is featured in the WMO’s concept note “Data Handling and the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Environmental Modelling”

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