The German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded a Reinhart Koselleck Project to the University of Cologne, providing €1.25 million over five years. The project brings together computer science and meteorology to advance cloud modeling and improve our understanding of climate change.
The project, titled “Sublinear Algorithms for Meteorology,” is led by Prof. Dr. Susanne Crewell (Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology) and Prof. Dr. Christian Sohler (Institute of Computer Science). Over the next five years, the team will explore how state-of-the-art algorithmic methods from computer science can be adapted to analyze very large meteorological datasets, enabling progress in cloud modeling. Reinhart Koselleck Projects are awarded exclusively to researchers with outstanding scientific track records and focus on particularly innovative, high-risk research with transformative potential.
Clouds remain one of the largest sources of uncertainty in climate modeling. Their highly variable behavior in space and time makes it challenging to understand how they respond to climate change, even though they significantly influence it. Efficient processing of the enormous volumes of data, such as satellite observations, is essential to study these processes, but it currently presents a major challenge.
Algorithmic theory offers approaches for analyzing large datasets, but these are typically developed for idealized scenarios and cannot be directly applied to cloud modeling. Adapting and extending these methods to practical meteorological problems requires highly interdisciplinary work. The new project will focus on developing data reduction techniques, known as coresets, and analyzing them both theoretically and experimentally in the context of meteorological data. These methods will be used to preprocess cloud observations and study patterns and trends in cloud organization.
By combining innovations in computer science and meteorology, the project aims to generate new approaches that will enhance our understanding of clouds and, ultimately, contribute to a better understanding of climate change.
Read more here.