Climate modeling skills have increased significantly over the past decade in many important areas. Yet there are still persistent biases and common assumptions that limit their usefulness at local or regional scales, despite the growing demand for such information for adaptation and building climate resilience. I will discuss paths forward to increase the utility of climate models, including new data analysis capabilities, greater inclusion of new processes, and the use of machine learning. I will also discuss observational gaps and theoretical limitations that will modulate any future progress – regardless of improvements in computational capacity.

About the Speaker: Gavin Schmidt is Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and served as Acting Senior Climate Advisor to the NASA Administrator in 2021. He is currently working on the simulation of past, present and possible climate. futures and has over 150 peer-reviewed publications. He authored, with Joshua Wolfe, “Climate Change: Picturing the Science” in 2009, and in 2011 he was the first recipient of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Climate Communication Award. He is a member of AGU and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and his 2014 TED talk on climate modeling has been viewed over a million times.

A recorded presentation from the NASA JPL Center for Climate Sciences Distinguished Climate Lecture Series.

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