Join us to hear CEE Alum Brian Henn talk this Thursday, January 22, 2026 at 3:30 in More Hall Room 225.
Title: AI at Ai2 for Earth System Modeling
Abstract: Over the past several years, AI has been used to produce weather forecasts that can be more accurate than conventional physics-based forecast models, and run with less computational expense. More recently, these AI-based approaches have become applicable to the long-running earth system simulations that have been traditionally conducted by global climate models (GCMs). Here we present the Ai2 Climate Emulator (ACE), an AI-based modeling framework for emulation of earth system models. ACE’s emulation of the global atmosphere is highly efficient, running over 1000 times faster than comparable GCMs. ACE is also expanding to include coupled atmosphere-ocean emulation, as well as downscaling of climate simulation outputs to kilometer-scale resolution.
Bio: Brian Henn is a research engineer at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) in Seattle, where he has been a member of the climate modeling team since 2019. Brian earned his Ph.D. from the Mountain Hydrology Research Group in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Washington; he also was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UCSD.
