Prasanna Balprakash, director of AI programs for the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, discussed advancing climate and weather research through high performance computing and artificial intelligence as part of a September 18 panel for the United States Senate.
Hosted by the United States Coalition for the Advancement of Supercomputing, or USCAS, NVIDIA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Balaprakash was joined by other leading experts from industry, government and academia to provide insight into how supercomputing, AI and meteorology can work together to provide more accurate weather predictions, especially during instances of extreme and dangerous weather.
"Over the past decade, extreme weather events have caused $1.2 trillion in damages, devastating lives, homes and communities across the nation," said Balaprakash. "As floods, wildfires and hurricanes become more frequent, the need for accurate and timely predictions has never been more urgent. By leveraging high-performance computing and AI, we can improve resolution, enhance prediction accuracy and reduce response times."
Trish Damkroger from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dr. Dorothy Koch from the Department of Energy, Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Dr. Karthik Kashinath from NVIDIA also participated in the panel, exploring ways that rapidly improving machine learning models designed for weather prediction can be used during severe events.
Balaprakash stressed the role the DOE's Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security and Technology, or FASST, initiative plays in this effort.
"The DOE's FASST initiative provides a robust framework for collaboration between DOE labs, industry partners, academia and key stakeholders - focused on data, computing infrastructure, trustworthy AI foundations, applications and workforce development," Balaprakash said. "This is essential for advancing Earth system predictability and ensuring a safer future."
Earth system predictability is the study of how extreme weather is predicted and is impacted by climate change.
Balaprakash has been invited to speak on Capitol Hill before, most recently at a roundtable discussion hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation in 2023.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the U.S. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit https://energy.gov/science. - Mark Alewine
