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Jatan Buch

@jatanbuch.bsky.social
504 followers 467 following 56 posts

Scientist studying clouds, wildfires, air quality, with physics and machine learning

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Reposted by Jatan Buch
Sebastian Lerch @sebastianlerch.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
📣 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 🧵
arxiv.org
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...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
Useful law for estimating the overall speedup from ML/GPU optimizing subcomponents of scientific code en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%...
en.wikipedia.org
Amdahl's law - Wikipedia
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
AI NWP models will solve this, right? RIGHT?
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
Thanks for the inquiry, Carly! While very interesting, paleoecology is not my area of expertise and I recommend you reach out to @grumpyunclesean.bsky.social or @mhurteau.bsky.social for a comment instead.
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investNscience @investnscience.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
Ever been told to ""sleep on it""? 😴 @alanajaskir.bsky.social’s research shows how snoozing helps your brain learn! #sleepbenefits #replay #hippocampus #academicsky #standupforscience
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Dr. Jeff Masters @drjeffmasters.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
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
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Kelly Hereid @kellyhereid.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
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.
linkedin.com
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.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
Anecdotally, even, most of my peers who accepted faculty positions switched their research to focus more on public health impacts of climate/weather. Which is great! However, it is in no small part because NIH until recently used to be a much larger pool of new funding than NSF/DOE.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
Provocative q: why admit more PhDs when static funding for the past decade or so (adjusted for inflation) has made tenure track offers in most areas quite limited? This is a broader point beyond the completely egg-headed funding cuts that appear to be on the horizon.
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Reposted by Jatan Buch
Mike Pritchard @mikepritchard.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
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?...
youtu.be
AI is making whole earth simulation possible--why that matters | Mike Pritchard | TEDxBoston
YouTube video by TEDx Talks
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Pierre Gentine @pierregentine.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
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
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LEAP-STC @leapstc.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
☀️ 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/...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
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...
cambridge.org
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
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Reposted by Jatan Buch
David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
Words of wisdom from @naomioreskes.bsky.social's Science on a Mission.
“Few patrons have ever supported science for the love of knowledge alone; most have had orthogonal (or at least oblique) motivations, be they prestige, power, or the solution of practical problems, and the available evidence suggests that those motivations make a difference.”
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Reposted by Jatan Buch
GrumpyUncleSean🔥 @grumpyunclesean.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
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 ...
nature.com
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...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Same. They were creative under constraints, now everyone benefits. Also a strong argument for open-sourcing all code.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
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.
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Reposted by Jatan Buch
Michael Wara @michaelwara.bsky.social · 12/01/2025
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:
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Reposted by Jatan Buch
Daniel Swain @weatherwest.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
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...
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Kelly Hereid @kellyhereid.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
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
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Downslope Wind‐Driven Fires in the Western United States
Downslope wind-driven fires accounted for 13.4% of fire occurrence and 11.9% of total burned area in the western United States during 1992–2020 Most structure losses and fatalities in fires 1999–...
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Reposted by Jatan Buch
Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 02/01/2025
Skew-T Log-P xkcd.com/3032
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Zeke Hausfather @zekehausfather.com · 01/12/2024
“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...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Republicans Would Regret Letting Elon Musk Ax Weather Forecasting
Everyone benefits from government weather forecasting. Republicans have the chance to make it better.
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Ashesh Chattopadhyay @ashesh6810.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
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
arxiv.org
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...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
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?
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Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
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...
nytimes.com
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.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
new christian right => fewer cars/household => climate mitigation?
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Pete Buttigieg might be the rare politician that excels at both the literary and oral, then.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
Most of the eastern US has been under drought conditions for a couple of months -- the intense winds yesterday and untimely ignitions did not help.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
+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."
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The 2016 Southeastern U.S. Drought: An Extreme Departure From Centennial Wetting and Cooling
New gridded monthly soil-moisture estimates indicate that the southeast U.S. drought in fall 2016 was the second most severe since at least 1895 The driver was low precipitation, but record-high ev...
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Reposted by Jatan Buch
LEAP-STC @leapstc.bsky.social · 08/11/2024
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
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Brian J Harvey @brian-j-harvey.bsky.social · 24/10/2024
#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
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Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social · 22/10/2024
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.
Timeseries of GISTEMP annual temperatures with uncertainties from 1880 to 2023 and including an estimate for 2024 using YTD temperatures. The 2024 estimate is clearly above and distinct from all previous years and straddles the '1.5ºC above the late 19th C' line.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 17/09/2024
For several years, I have been mostly focused on ML models and their climate applications. So it felt good to have contributed something more physically motivated; here's a new algorithm we developed to simulate aerosol perturbations (or seeding) in PySDM: github.com/open-atmos/P...
github.com
Release PySDM v2.75 · open-atmos/PySDM
What's Changed Seeding dynamic and associated initialisation logic (super-droplet injection during simulation) in #1367 Kudos @jtbuch & @claresinger! Full Changelog: v2.74...v2.75
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Reposted by Jatan Buch
Kate Mackenzie @katemac.bsky.social · 24/08/2024
Bidenomics architect Deese set out a cheaper, green-ish “Marshall Plan” this week. @70sbachchan.bsky.social and I looked at key developments that led to this (a lot has happened!) and what’s wrong / missing (some big things). buttondown.com/polycrisisdi...
buttondown.com
How Deese got there
Welcome to another Polycrisis Dispatch. This is edition #15! This week the Brian Deese — former WH National Economic Council director of Bidenomics — essay...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
I should add that the spatial and temporal scales for these forecasts unfortunately do not quite capture the dynamics of rapidly growing wildfires such as the #ParkFire : x.com/US_Stormwatc...
x.com
x.com
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
have their own uncertainty intervals that are not shown here. 4. Last, these forecasts are experimental in nature and should not be used in any decision-making.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
at the upper end of ensemble spread for the mean size-high frequency (gpd-high-2sig) case and is best described by large size-high frequency (gpd-ext-high-2sig) scenario. The red shaded area is the variance of the ensemble mean whereas gray lines are means of different ensemble members, which...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
3. Focusing on the Middle Rockies, the ecoregion that includes the Blue Mountains which is the site of 4 large Oregon wildfires that have burned ~3000 km^2, we see that the models forecast fire frequency to be significantly lower than the climatological mean, while the burned area appears to be...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
Both are normalized by the 2001-2020 mean fire prob. 2. The model forecasts fire prob on a 12km x 12km grid, which is then used to calculate fire frequency for aggregate ecoregions. A separate model takes the stochastic ignitions, generating sizes of individual fires and the total burned area.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
vapor pressure deficit (VPD), and precipitation (Prec) from SEAS5 ensemble runs initialized in June. The ensemble mean predicted fire prob is shown in the left panel, whereas the ensemble uncertainty, derived using the standard deviation of member forecasts, is shown on the right.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
A few notes: 1. The model forecasts have been generated using the SMLFire1.0 model (see bsky.app/profile/jata... for more details) run in forecast mode, i.e with observations and reanalysis data for various fire-related predictors until May and climate model outputs of monthly mean Tmax, Tmin,
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
August 2024 appears to follow a similar pattern, with elevated fire danger in coastal Central/Southern California -- not a good sign for a region that saw several fires in July, notably the Lake Fire in Los Padres National Forest inciweb.wildfire.gov/incident-inf...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
predicted an above baseline fire probability (warmer colors > 1) for large areas in the Middle Rockies, Blue Mts., Great Basin, as well as sections of the Sierra Nevada (app.watchduty.org/i/27638) with ~68% confidence across the 51 member ECMWF SEAS5 ensemble initialized in June.
app.watchduty.org
Watch Duty - Wildfire Maps & Alerts
Real-time information about wildfire and firefighting efforts nearby
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
As the fire season intensifies over parts of the western United States, I wanted to share some results from ongoing work to improve seasonal and subseasonal-to-seasonal scale forecasts of wildfire frequency and burned area with machine learning. The model forecast for July 2024:
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 06/04/2024
My colleagues at LEAP STC are organizing a ML for Earth System Modeling workshop at ICML 2024 this July. Please consider submitting and share the call for papers among interested folks! leap-stc.github.io/ml4esm-works...
leap-stc.github.io
Machine Learning for Earth System Modeling
ICML 2024
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Robert W. Gray @firebobbc.bsky.social · 24/03/2024
An outstanding report from ProPublica - an indictment of how the agencies are mistreating their most valuable resource and it's not just the woefully inadequate level of compensation but also the failure to attend to cancer and emotional trauma and stress. www.propublica.org/article/wild...
propublica.org
“It Feels Impossible to Stay”: The U.S. Needs Wildland Firefighters More Than Ever, but the Federal Government Is Losing Them
Highly skilled firefighters are the last line of defense against wildfires, but that line is fraying because the government decided long ago that they’re not worth very much.
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Hung Nguyen @ntthung.bsky.social · 29/01/2024
Last semester, I asked my students to analyze CRU data. Naturally most worked on the country or town they came from, and they found interesting things. Here is the annual mean precipitation over Iraq. A sudden jump in variability?
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ClimateFran @climatefran.bsky.social · 21/01/2024
Couldn't agree more with this op-ed by Justin Mankin on the importance of public, actionable climate risk information CEA, OMB and Treasury make a similar argument in this public memo on priorities for climate-economic modeling: www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u... www.nytimes.com/2024/01/20/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | The People Have a Right to Climate Data
Information about climate risks is becoming increasingly valuable to companies that want to sell it.
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 11/01/2024
Studying these trade-offs in conjunction with prescribed burning efficacy, i.e. worse smoke impacts avoided from a potential wildfire in the same area, is something we (w/ Kara Lamb, Pierre Gentine) looked at in a study led by Kyleen Liao and believe it's a topic that needs closer scrutiny.
arxiv.org
Simulating the Air Quality Impact of Prescribed Fires Using a...
The increasing size and severity of wildfires across western North America have generated dangerous levels of PM$_{2.5}$ pollution in recent years. In a warming climate, expanding the use of...
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Jatan Buch @jatanbuch.bsky.social · 11/01/2024
Interesting paper quantifying the smoke related trade-offs from different forms of forest management for wildfire mitigation
nature.com
Quantifying the smoke-related public health trade-offs of forest management - Nature Sustainability
Prescribed burning is a common tool to mitigate the risk of dangerous wildfires. However, careful consideration of the public health impacts should be incorporated into forest management plans.
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