Regional Earth System Modeling and Forecasting

Speaker: Dr. Yi Chao,
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CAAbstract: It was March 5, 1950, the first computerized weather forecast was issued using the world's first-ever electronic computer known as ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). It took just about 24 hours to make a 24-hour forecast. Today, a 7-day weather forecast takes only a few hours on today's supercomputers, and it becomes routine to check weather conditions before taking a vacation.In this talk, I will summarize the essential elements of a weather forecasting system. I will then review the current research and progress to apply the weather forecast technology in forecasting other Earth system components such as hurricane, ocean and climate. Our recent experiences in developing a forecasting system for the southern California coastal ocean will be described. The needs to refine these forecast systems ( e.g., increase the spatial resolutions from kilometers to meters down to the street level for air quality forecasting) and the associated information technology and computational challenge will be discussed.About the speaker (http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Chao/)
Dr. Yi Chao received his Ph.D. in 1990 from Princeton University in a joint graduate program with NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. After two years' postdoc research at UCLA, he joined Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology as a Research Scientist in 1993. He is now a Principal Scientist and the manager for the Climate, Oceans and Solid Earth Section within the science division. His research interests include satellite oceanography with a particular focus on coastal oceans, numerical modeling and data assimilation, interdisciplinary science of Earth system science, and climate variability and change.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes