Mathematics and Machine Learning for Earth System Simulation - IPAM

Mathematics and Machine Learning for Earth System Simulation

February 2 - 6, 2026

Schedule

All times in this Schedule are Pacific Time (PT)

Monday, February 2, 2026

Morning Session

08:00-08:55
Check-In/Breakfast (Hosted by IPAM)
08:55-09:00
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Session Chair: Adam Rupe
09:00-09:50
Katherine Breen (NASA)
Foundation Models as a New Backbone for Medium-range Forecasting and Data Assimilation
10:00-10:15
Break
10:15-11:05
Tom Beucler (University of Lausanne)
Artificial Intelligence Pathways from Weather to Climate
11:15-11:30
Break
11:30-12:20
Noah Brenowitz (NVIDIA)
Does progress in Earth System Modeling require more data, more compute, or both?

Afternoon Session

12:30-14:30
Lunch (on your own)
Session Chair: Kathy Breen
14:30-15:20
Michael Ghil (Ecole Normale Supérieure)
Global warming and global weirding: Nonautonomous dynamics for chaotic and noisy systems
15:30-16:00
Break
16:00-16:50
Johan Mathé (Atmo.AI)
Earth System Symmetries: Geometry, Groups, and the Limits of Structure in Machine Learning
17:00-17:20
Lightning Poster Round
17:20-18:50
Poster Session & Reception (Hosted by IPAM)

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Morning Session

08:00-08:55
Check-In/Breakfast (Hosted by IPAM)
Session Chair: Milan Curcic
09:00-09:50
Marcus van Lier-Walqui (Columbia University)
Clouds in weather and climate models: uncertainties and how to quantify, constrain, and propagate them with deterministic and stochastic approaches.
10:00-10:15
Break
10:15-11:05
Tapio Schneider (California Institute of Technology)
Hybrid Physics/AI Modeling of Turbulence, Convection, and Cloud Feedbacks in the CliMA Climate Model
11:15-11:30
Break
11:30-12:20
Damian Rouson (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory)
Learning cloud microphysics via progressive refinement mimicking maximal information entropy

Afternoon Session

12:30-14:30
Lunch (on your own)
Session Chair: Marcus van Lier-Walqui
14:30-15:20
Dimitris Giannakis (Dartmouth College)
Operator-theoretic approaches to feature extraction and statistical modeling of climate dynamics
15:30-16:00
Break
16:00-16:50
Adam Rupe (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
A complex systems perspective on machine learning for Earth science.

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Morning Session

08:00-08:55
Check-In/Breakfast (Hosted by IPAM)
Session Chair: DJ Gagne
09:00-09:50
Milan Curcic (University of Miami)
Deterministic AI Agents for Downstream Tasks & Example Application to Hurricane Forecasting
10:00-10:15
Break
10:15-11:05
Donifan Barahona (NASA)
Synthesizing Observations, Simulations, and In Situ Data into a New Class of Atmospheric Retrievals
11:15-11:30
Break
11:30-12:20
Maria Molina (University of Maryland)
Learning Without Labels: New Insights into Climate and Extremes

Afternoon Session

12:30-12:40
Group Photo
12:40-14:30
Lunch (on your own)
Session Chair: Dimitris Giannakis
14:30-15:20
Michael Fischer (University of Miami)
A Machine Learning Approach to Estimate the Three-Dimensional Tropical Cyclone Kinematic Structure
15:30-16:00
Break
16:00-16:50
Eduardo Siman (Worldsphere.ai)
Image-to-Image Tropical Cyclone Wind Field Diagnosis

Thursday, February 5, 2026

Morning Session

08:00-08:55
Check-In/Breakfast (Hosted by IPAM)
Session Chair: Tom Beucler
09:00-09:50
Po-Lun Ma (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Encoding microphysics in Earth system modeling with artificial intelligence
10:00-10:15
Break
10:15-11:05
Mohamed Iskandarani (University of Miami)
Uncertainty Quantification in Ocean-Atmosphere Simulations Using Polynomial Chaos Methods and Gaussian Process Regression
11:15-11:30
Break
11:30-12:20
Claire Valva (California Institute of Technology)
Koopman operator methods for analysis of tropical climate variability

Afternoon Session

12:30-14:30
Lunch (on your own)
Session Chair: Maria Molina
14:30-15:20
Gary Froyland (University of New South Wales)
Operator-theoretic methods for earth systems: atmosphere, ocean, and ML.
15:30-16:00
Break
16:00-16:50
Open Discussion

Friday, February 6, 2026

Morning Session

08:00-08:55
Check-In/Breakfast (Hosted by IPAM)
TBA
09:00-09:50
Haiwen Guan (Pennsylvania State University)
LUCIE: A Lightweight Uncoupled ClImate Emulator with long-term stability and physical consistency
10:00-10:15
Break
10:15-11:05
Franca Hoffmann (California Institute of Technology)
Efficient calibration for black-box physics-based models
11:15-11:30
Break
11:30-12:20
David John Gagne (National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR))
Physics and Uncertainty in the Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin
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