iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Philip Brohan

Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 25/09/2026

Everyday weather in a warmer world Imagine the weather patterns that happened in 1903 occurred again in a warmer world - how would that weather be experienced differently? Thomas et al. answer this question, highlighting the thermodynamic response of the climate: esd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...

esd.copernicus.org

Everyday weather in a warmer world

Abstract. How would the weather of a year from history be experienced in a warmer world? We reconstruct the weather of 1903 using a reanalysis system that assimilates only surface pressure observation...

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 21/09/2026

Seems a lot - you could get pretty close today with by renting a big desktop for £3,000/yr and spending £500/year in electricity running it flat out 24/7? www.macstories.net/stories/m5-u... And the power/price ratio is increasing *fast*.

macstories.net

M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents

For the past few days, I’ve been testing the (currently) top-of-the-line M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256 GB of RAM. I’ll cut to the chase: the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is a dream machine for local AI agents. ...

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 19/08/2026

Did he say how? We're running them all through AI to extract the data. It did not occur to me to cluster them by style, or otherwise extract non-rainfall information from them. I wonder what we could learn.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 16/07/2026

Can a ship called Ulysses really be expected to go straight home? Watch out for Laestrygonians.

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 13/05/2026

Imagine the same synoptic weather patterns occurred in a warmer world. How would our experience of the weather be different? Warmer? Yes Wetter? Only on the wettest 10% of days Everyday weather in a warmer world by Thomas et al.: egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...

Changed temperature and rainfall in an example month in Central England

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 12/05/2026

Ever wondered whether there are more historical weather observations still sitting on paper for <insert country>? The answer is certainly yes. And, for observations taken by the British, many logbooks are now openly available thanks to UK Met Office: digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/SO_380c734a-...

digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk

International Clim Rtn | Met Office UA

METDLA/6/4/2

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 30/04/2026

FWIW, UK temperatures (from station observations) don't show this effect. 2025 minimum temperature is not obviously anomalous. www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/wea...

metoffice.gov.uk

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

Doug McNeall @dougmcneall.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Can we make this a ceremonial position, like with a uniform and a sword or something? We could do the same for other long-running climate records.

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Jared Rennie @jjrennie.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

TODAY IS THE DAY! Today I anger every member of the weather, water, and climate enterprise by telling them to jump on the AI train or get left behind. Get your tomatoes and "boos' ready!

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 11/03/2026

Kudos to whoever has started-up the one station in DR Congo. 🙂 Why are there no observations from the Sea of Okhotsk?

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 08/03/2026

AI is transformatory for climate data rescue - brohan.org/Robot_Rainfa...

brohan.org

Robot Rainfall Rescue — Robot Rainfall Rescue

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 10/12/2025

It doesn't come with an example for how to fine-tune it using hf transformers, so it will be way more work to use than the three models I started with. My model selection process was heavily biased by the availability of easy-to-modify examples. But worth considering for the longer term.

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 08/12/2025

Exciting jobs & PhD studentship! 1) postdoc in historical windstorms: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai... 2) postdoc in extreme event storylines: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai... 3) PhD in redeveloping the Central England Temperature series (led by Tim Osborn): www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 08/12/2025

brohan.org/Robot_Rainfa... does this with a trio of mini-AIs.

brohan.org

Robot Rainfall Rescue — Robot Rainfall Rescue

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 16/10/2025

AI is indeed the perfect tool for climate data rescue. The trick is to follow the same process you'd use for citizen science - except, instead of 1000s of human volunteers, you use a trio of fine-tuned baby robots. brohan.org/Robot_Rainfa...

Three baby robots, dressed up for graduation in hood and gown, leaping in the air in celebration.

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Peter Thorne @peterthorne.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Two job opportunities on new @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social contract until 30/06/28. Both looking at aspects of data rescue and preparation and provision of global historical land meteorological data. Looking to fill ASAP. First job is for a senior postdoctoral position: my.corehr.com/pls/nuimrecr...

eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 14/07/2025

The future of scientific publishing is YouTube, Github, Medium, Substack, ... I don't see much of that in the agenda.

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

John Kennedy @micefearboggis.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

This is a work of art.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 04/04/2025

It is easy to come up with designs for ground-breaking climate models using ML. The thing that's very hard is to come up with a ML climate model that looks and operates like an NWP model. If we can find the courage to move on from NWP, then the future is bright indeed.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 20/03/2025

They only use ERA5 at all because they are doing NWP imitation. Eventually they will realise that to forecast London precip. (say) an AI model doesn’t have to bother with the whole NWP state vector. Then we’ll start to see real improvements.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 20/03/2025

The really interesting result is the reduced observational requirement for DA. How far can we push that?

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 20/03/2025

You could build a model without ERA5 - train it on satellite data, in-situ observations, or what you will. There just isn't much point. While all the AI models use ERA5, they don't require it. It really is a supercomputer-free forecasting system.

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

Amanda Whitmire @thalassalib.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

I'm always looking for ways to make it faster to transcribe historical data, & structured handwritten text has been a real challenge. I just tested Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash model on some Monterey Bay temperature data from 1952. I'm pretty impressed! Not perfect, but better than a blank page. 🌊

A screenshot of two application windows open next to each other. On the left is a scanned page of handwritten ocean temperature data from March 1952, and on the right is a Google sheet with most of the data transcribed. There are missing values in places, but the digital data is very accurate.

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Tim Andrews @tim-andrews.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Delighted to announce I have taken on a joint position between the Met Office and the University of Leeds: Research Scientist | Met Office Hadley Centre Associate Professor | University of Leeds Looking forward to getting to work on this. See news article below 👇

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 12/02/2025

Want to do a PhD in climate, with a focus on using machine learning to recover millions of lost weather observations and so better reconstruct climatic changes over the past century? Open to students from UK and Ireland, funded through @climatecocentre.bsky.social. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

findaphd.com

Using machine learning to help reconstruct changes in extreme rainfall over British & Irish Isles at University of Reading on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - Using machine learning to help reconstruct changes in extreme rainfall over British & Irish Isles at University of Reading, listed on FindAPhD.com

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

National Oceanography Centre @noc.ac.uk · 12/02/2025

🔭 How accurate are historic sea surface temperatures? NOC's Dr Elizabeth Kent MBE (@lizk40.bsky.social) gives us a rundown and explores a particularly puzzling cold feature on #NOCIntoTheBlue. Watch, listen and subscribe NOW 🎧 linktr.ee/nocintotheblue

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 11/02/2025

The state vector describing reality has way too many dimensions. What else can we do?

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 05/02/2025

I won't be following up myself (the data I'm after is almost all in tables). But I do urge you to give it a go - point your browser at aistudio.google.com upload your image and start asking. It could hardle be easier to experiment with.

aistudio.google.com

Google AI Studio

Google AI Studio is the fastest way to start building with Gemini, our next generation family of multimodal generative AI models.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 05/02/2025

And as so often it's not perfect, but it's very promising. Definitely worth looking into.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 05/02/2025

No. But since you ask. I've uploaded a page from "A Collection of Voyages Chiefly in the Southern Atlantick Ocean" books.google.co.uk/books?id=sGx... And asked Gemini a couple of questions:

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 05/02/2025

I was thinking that maybe in a couple of months there would be an upgrade to Gemini that we should experiment with. I made insufficient allowance for 'AI time'. An update has come out today - developers.googleblog.com/en/gemini-2-... I don't know if it makes any difference.

developers.googleblog.com

Gemini 2.0: Flash, Flash-Lite and Pro

The Gemini 2.0 model family is now updated, to include the production-ready Gemini 2.0 Flash, the experimental Gemini 2.0 Pro, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 05/02/2025

All the code is available at the link, and Gemini's free tier is enough to experiment with. Go on - give it a try.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 05/02/2025

" We can say with some confidence that we are better at reading the logs than the original log-keepers were at writing them." I think we are very close to being able to replace the 'we' with 'AIs'.

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 15/01/2025

In 2018, @blkahn.bsky.social said that the warming stripes graphic 'belongs in a damn museum', even suggesting that it was 'fit for the Museum of Modern Art' (see gizmodo.com/this-climate...). Well... Later this month, they will appear in the Museum of Modern Art: press.moma.org/exhibition/p...

This Climate Visualization Belongs in a Damn Museum

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 01/01/2025

Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea In honour of today's #ShippingForecast centenary, here's a weather map of December's #StormDarragh - made out of the associated shipping forecast.

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Reposted by Philip Brohan

Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 30/12/2024

Congratulations to Prof. Phil Jones (UEA) for receiving an OBE for services to climatology! Well deserved and long overdue recognition for his efforts over many decades to collate and analyse observational records of climatic changes. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/676a8b...

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Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 30/12/2024

And, amazing to see @lizk40.bsky.social receive an MBE for services to tracking global temperatures. Richly deserved for all her efforts over decades!

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Berkeley Earth @berkeleyearth.org · 10/12/2024

Today at #AGU24: In a session co-chaired by BE's @hausfath.bsky.social, @rarohde.bsky.social will be diving into the factors, both well-defined and more unexpected, that contributed to 2023's record-setting ("gobsmackingly bananas") extreme heat. Find us at: 📍GC23K-02 / Salon A ⏰ 14:21 - 14:33

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 05/12/2024

Yes, but we've made reconstructions of the period before: Here's one from cp.copernicus.org/articles/8/1... I think this is the first time I've seen a square-wave signal.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 05/12/2024

Great stuff - though I'm a touch suspicious of those steep gradients back in the early C19. Where do I download the dataset from?

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 26/11/2024

ML offers the potential to learn a relationship between SST and *any* observable. How far can we puch that?

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 26/11/2024

I want to see us make SST datasets from observations of things other than temperature. We know from 20CR that we can geet good precipitation estimates from SST and pressure - seems likely that we can get good SST estimates from pressure and precipitation.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 24/04/2024

A tribute to the genius of Albrecht Dürer and the power of matplotlib.

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Philip Brohan @brohan.org · 25/02/2024

Recorded history is not that many human lifetimes. (Also, ChatGPT is fun to play with).

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