"Emulators and Parameterizations: Indirect Tools for Climate Science"

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 at 12:30pm to 1:30pm

Seminar Announcement
Department of Estuarine and Ocean Sciences

"Emulators and Parameterizations: Indirect Tools for Climate Science"
Dr. Baylor Fox-Kemper,
Professor, Brown University

Wednesday, February 18, 2026
12:30 - 1:30 pm
SMAST E 101-103 and via Zoom

Abstract:

As Earth system models grow in complexity and computational cost, two approaches offer opportunities to accelerate progress and deepen understanding: parameterizations and emulators. I will distinguish these two strategies in a practical way.  Focusing on the ocean, I’ll discuss an emulator that is a key path to quantifying regional mixed layer depth (MLD) affects climate sensitivity, connecting surface mixing processes to the spread in model projections of climate change. By combining observations with this emulator, we attribute about 40% of uncertainty in projected climate sensitivity to processes leading to MLD biases.  I’ll also show how an emulator (the energy balance model–Kalman filter: EBM–KF) can do many things we struggle to do with climate models.  It assimilates global surface temperature and ocean heat content to generate rapid, probabilistic projections and allows efficient exploration of policy thresholds, internal variability, and the impact of external forcings like volcanic eruptions. A final emulator example is the ISEFlow ice sheet emulator which allows projections of the ice sheet contributions to sea level rise.  This emulator has been trained against ice sheet resolving models from the ISMIP6 project, and it is changing our assessments of how sensitive ice sheets are to climate change.  I'll close with some of our plans for emulators in Narragansett Bay--this ongoing work will allow us to do coastal modeling more efficiently and open up new evaluation techniques.

Together, these new emulator tools—optimized for interpretability, accuracy, and speed—provide new ways to study the climate. 

Join Meeting
https://umassd.zoom.us/j/97440069270
Note: Meeting ID and password required, please email contact to obtain.

SMAST East 101-103 : 836 S. Rodney French Boulevard, New Bedford MA 02744
Callie Rumbut
c.rumbut@umassd.edu
https://umassd.zoom.us/j/97440069270