Research in weather and climate science plays a crucial role in improving understanding, and building resilience against the impacts of extreme weather events and a changing climate. The mission of the Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS) is to advance scientific understanding of tropical climate variability and change and its associated weather systems affecting Singapore and the wider Southeast Asia region, so that the knowledge and expertise can benefit decision makers and the community. Dr. Barker will begin the talk by providing an overview of the climate challenge, CCRS, and current frontiers of research.

Since the earliest days of numerical weather prediction (NWP) at the start of the 20th century, where ‘human computers’ were proposed to predict the weather, there has been a close tie between climate and computational science. Dr. Barker will provide a short history of the development of NWP and climate modelling/projections, emphasizing the increased reliance on supercomputers to deliver results as climate models become increasingly complex, and provide products and advice to an expanding range of stakeholders.

Climate science places many demands on supercomputers and software engineering: sheer computer power to number-crunch billions of calculations / second to provide timely weather/climate predictions; storage of ‘big data’; cross-platform efficiency; robustness; and reproducibility. Dr. Barker will provide examples of how these challenges have been addressed to date, and end with a forward-look of the future where the increasing complexity, the cloud, machine learning, and the advent of novel HPC architectures will require expanded partnerships between climate, computational and data science communities.