Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth System Science; Associate Dean of Research and Innovation, School of Engineering: Office of the Dean

University of California, Irvine

Presentation Title:

Machine Learning and Climate Networks for Regional Climate Prediction

Abstract:

Understanding the factors that determine regional climate variability and change is a challenge with important implications for the economy, security and environmental sustainability of many regions around the globe. To address this challenge advanced physics-based modeling and data analytic methodologies are needed for interrogating observations and state-of-the-art climate model simulations to enhance process-level understanding, diagnose climate modes, and detect and attribute regional manifestations of climate variability and change for improved modeling and prediction. Based on recent observational evidence, our work has revealed a new teleconnection between sub-tropical sea surface temperatures off the coast of New Zealand and regional precipitation in the Southwestern US with impressively stronger and earlier predictive potential compared to any other known mode of variability, including ENSO. The inter-hemispheric nature and the time-lagged propagation of Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies characterizing this new teleconnection have highlighted the need to develop new formalisms of machine learning (based on regularization, sparsity and locally linear approximations) and climate networks that systematically explore complex dependencies in the spatio-temporal domain to reveal robust and physically consistent dynamics. This talk will discuss our efforts in this direction.

Bio:

Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth System Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the Samueli School of Engineering at UCI. She is also Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota where she was a faculty (1989-2016), a McKnight Distinguished Professor and the Joseph T. and Rose S. Ling Chair in Environmental Engineering. She has served as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center (National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, NCED) and Director of the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. Prof. Foufoula-Georgiou’s area of research is hydrology, hydroclimatology, and geomorphology, with special interest on scaling theories, multiscale dynamics, space-time modeling of precipitation and landforms, and global to regional climate variability. She has served as chair of the board of directors of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences (CUASHI), trustee of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), and president of the Hydrology section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Prof. Foufoula-Georgiou has been an advisor to several national and international agencies and research foundations, including the advisory council of NSF’s Geosciences Directorate, NASA Earth Science subcommittee, the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academies, and the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. She is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the European Academy of Sciences (EAS), fellow of the AGU, AMS and AAAS, and the recipient of several disciplinary awards including the John Dalton Medal of the European Geophysical Union, the AGU Hydrologic Sciences Award, and the AMS Hydrologic Sciences Medal. She received a B.A. in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Florida.