Jatan Buch
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Jatan Buch
@jatanbuch.bsky.social
Scientist studying clouds, wildfires, air quality, with physics and machine learning
Reposted by Jatan Buch
📣 New preprint "Probabilistic measures afford fair comparisons of AIWP and NWP model output" with Tilmann Gneiting, Tobias Biegert, Kristof Kraus, Eva Walz and Alexander Jordan available at arxiv.org/abs/2506.03744. Some details below 🧵
Probabilistic measures afford fair comparisons of AIWP and NWP model output
We introduce a new measure for fair and meaningful comparisons of single-valued output from artificial intelligence based weather prediction (AIWP) and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, calle...
arxiv.org
June 5, 2025 at 8:48 AM
Useful law for estimating the overall speedup from ML/GPU optimizing subcomponents of scientific code

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%...
Amdahl's law - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
April 26, 2025 at 12:46 AM
AI NWP models will solve this, right? RIGHT?
NWS just announced a major reduction in upper-air (weather balloon) observations due to staffing shortages.

Omaha and Rapid City losing balloon launches altogether, with launches cut in half at 6 other sites.

Losing this many launches could affect severe weather forecasting and computer models.
March 20, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Ever been told to ""sleep on it""? 😴 @alanajaskir.bsky.social’s research shows how snoozing helps your brain learn!

#sleepbenefits #replay #hippocampus #academicsky #standupforscience
March 7, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
After losing 2 flight directors (my old job), the NOAA Hurricane Hunters are down to minimum staffing for continuous hurricane flights. And if I still had my old job, I'd be looking for new employment before the next onslaught of cuts.
yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/03/noaa...
yaleclimateconnections.org
March 6, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Potentially interesting job for the NOAA crowd - Verisk, one of the biggest modeling firms in the insurance industry, is looking for an experienced atmospheric scientist.

Charles Jackson is hiring, who was on my PhD committee and is just a delight to work with, aside from being a kickass scientist.
Verisk hiring Senior Atmospheric Scientist in Boston, MA | LinkedIn
Posted 12:45:15 AM. Job DescriptionVerisk’s Extreme Event Solutions Research Department in Boston is seeking a…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.
www.linkedin.com
March 6, 2025 at 5:01 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Pleased to share my views in a new TEDx talk on how AI offers compelling new ways to simulate the Earth with unprecedented resolution and interactivity:
youtu.be/I0nxFLh-iBg?...
AI is making whole earth simulation possible--why that matters | Mike Pritchard | TEDxBoston
YouTube video by TEDx Talks
youtu.be
February 25, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Excited to share some great collaboration on a new data assimilation framework with transformer encoding arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02884. Exciting times for data assimilation with ML
arxiv.org
February 21, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
☀️ APPS ARE OPEN for our Summer'25 MOMENTUM FELLOWSHIP ☀️

- For data sci PhD students @ a U.S. institution
- Mentorship of REU students
- June 9 - August 1
- 5 research projects based in NYC and/or Boulder, CO

📆 INFO + APPLY by 3/15/25: leap.columbia.edu/education-2/...
February 19, 2025 at 5:38 PM
Kyleen Liao did stellar work with @karadlamb.bsky.social, Pierre Gentine, and me a while ago on simulating PM2.5 emissions from California wildfires using graph neural networks (GNNs). Her paper with cool new model validation results is out now: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Simulating the air quality impact of prescribed fires using graph neural network-based PM2.5 forecasts | Environmental Data Science | Cambridge Core
Simulating the air quality impact of prescribed fires using graph neural network-based PM2.5 forecasts - Volume 4
www.cambridge.org
February 18, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Words of wisdom from @naomioreskes.bsky.social's Science on a Mission.
February 16, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
1/n
Please see our new paper in Nature Communications!

We used 1,851 tree-ring fire-scar sites and contemporary fire perimeters to quantify the prevalence of wildfire from 1600-1880 compared to 1984-2022. 🧪🌍🔥

Our key findings are as follows ...
A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned - Nature Communications
Across many North American forests, recent years with exceptional area burned are not unprecedented when considering the multi-century perspective offered by fire-scarred trees. Nevertheless, abundant...
www.nature.com
February 10, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Also consistent with my experience that PNAS is actually a terrible journal. I know of several PNAS papers that were either straight wrong or you could not reproduce their results.
January 25, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
I should have led off this thread with the statement: this is how to think about wildlife risk and what we can do about it. No safety intervention makes a community perfectly safe. Many reduce risk. It is a layered and cumulative effort. Think about auto safety to understand what I mean:
People die in car crashes. A lot of people. In 2022 in the US, about 46,000. But if we had not made the safety improvements in cars that we have over the past half century - and had the same death rate as a result, 153,000 people would have died.
January 12, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Is there a link between #ClimateChange & increasing risk/severity of #wildfire in California--including the still-unfolding disaster? Yes. Is climate change the only factor at play? No, of course not. So what's really going on? [Thread] #CAfire #CAwx #LAfires iopscience.iop.org/a...
January 9, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Notice power generation - high wind events are bad news for transmission lines.

Suspect these statistics are worse for structures/fatalities - high wind fires make up 12% of burn area in western US, but 52% of lives/60% of structures lost, via @climate-guy.bsky.social @pyrogeog.bsky.social research
January 8, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Skew-T Log-P xkcd.com/3032
January 2, 2025 at 10:30 AM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
“With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error”

Good op-ed from Ryan Maue in todays @nytimes: www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/o...
Opinion | Republicans Would Regret Letting Elon Musk Ax Weather Forecasting
Everyone benefits from government weather forecasting. Republicans have the chance to make it better.
www.nytimes.com
December 1, 2024 at 11:31 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Arvind, me, and Jonah released a new pre-print on some pen and paper analysis of fundamental failure modes and old school stability analysis for neural PDEs typically used in AI for Science application. arxiv.org/abs/2411.15101. 1/n
What You See is Not What You Get: Neural Partial Differential Equations and The Illusion of Learning
Differentiable Programming for scientific machine learning (SciML) has recently seen considerable interest and success, as it directly embeds neural networks inside PDEs, often called as NeuralPDEs, d...
arxiv.org
November 25, 2024 at 8:45 PM
Is there a similar conversation we can have among climate scientists as the new administration freezes or cuts federal funding levels for climate related research? Should we be more private sector focused in our collaborations while also doing more public outreach in non-university spaces?
There have been a lot of times where I feel like we need to have honest discussions on the left about what has worked and what hasn’t, share observations without judgement, but it feels like there isn’t much space for it. I think it’s holding us back.

I wonder how and where we can accomplish that.
November 23, 2024 at 2:57 AM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
We have an opinion piece at the NYT on the need to operationalize some aspects of climate science. 🧪

Thoughts welcome!

(Gift link)
www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/o...
Opinion | Climate Science Can’t Keep Up With the Warming Planet
We need more timely updates in response to the rapid changes to the climate.
www.nytimes.com
November 13, 2024 at 11:20 AM
+1

Williams (2017): "While extreme drought has been rare in the SE U.S. over the past half century, the intensity and rapid onset of the SE U.S. drought in 2016, and its destructive impacts on wildfire...should motivate preparedness for reoccurrences of droughts of similar or stronger magnitude."
November 9, 2024 at 8:41 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
Thrilled to make LEAP's 1st jump into #Bluesky by hi-lighting our next-gen #climate #data scientists, who spearheaded today's ClimateML Methods Workshop + brought together early-career scientists in the #NYC area to share progress @ the intersection of #climate science + #ML!

#community #diversity
November 8, 2024 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
#HarveyLab @UW_SEFS is recruiting 1-2 funded PhD students in 2025.

Research is part of @NSF project testing mechanisms of forest resilience to fire + changing fire regimes in PNW
www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

+ opportunities to collab w/ WFFRC
westernfireforest.org

Apply to SEFS by Nov 15
October 24, 2024 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Jatan Buch
With the (belated) September data now in, the updated prediction is that 2024 is almost certain to be a new annual surface temperature record, and possibly by more than 0.1ºC. 50% change of exceeding 1.5ºC above the late 19th C.
October 22, 2024 at 2:22 PM