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Using uncertainty-aware machine learning models to study aerosol-cloud interactions
Maëlys Solal · Andrew Jesson · Yarin Gal · Alyson Douglas

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in Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning »
Event URL: https://www.climatechange.ai/papers/neurips2022/84 »

Aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) include various effects that result from aerosols entering a cloud, and affecting cloud properties. In general, an increase in aerosol concentration results in smaller droplet sizes which leads to larger, brighter, longer-lasting clouds that reflect more sunlight and cool the Earth. The strength of the effect is however heterogeneous, meaning it depends on the surrounding environment, making ACIs one of the most uncertain effects in our current climate models. In our work, we use causal machine learning to estimate ACI from satellite observations by reframing the problem as a treatment (aerosol) and outcome (change in droplet radius). We predict the causal effect of aerosols on clouds with bounds of uncertainty depending on the unknown factors that may be influencing the impact of aerosols. Of the three climate models evaluated, we find that only one plausibly recreates the trend, lending more credence to its estimate cooling due to ACI.

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Author Information

Maëlys Solal (University of Oxford | Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris)
Andrew Jesson (University of Oxford)
Yarin Gal (University of OXford)
Yarin Gal

Yarin leads the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning (OATML) group. He is an Associate Professor of Machine Learning at the Computer Science department, University of Oxford. He is also the Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science at Christ Church, Oxford, and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. Prior to his move to Oxford he was a Research Fellow in Computer Science at St Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge. He obtained his PhD from the Cambridge machine learning group, working with Prof Zoubin Ghahramani and funded by the Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship. He made substantial contributions to early work in modern Bayesian deep learning—quantifying uncertainty in deep learning—and developed ML/AI tools that can inform their users when the tools are “guessing at random”. These tools have been deployed widely in industry and academia, with the tools used in medical applications, robotics, computer vision, astronomy, in the sciences, and by NASA. Beyond his academic work, Yarin works with industry on deploying robust ML tools safely and responsibly. He co-chairs the NASA FDL AI committee, and is an advisor with Canadian medical imaging company Imagia, Japanese robotics company Preferred Networks, as well as numerous startups.

Alyson Douglas (University of Oxford)

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