NVIDIA’s Mike Pritchard Shares How Applying AI to Climate Simulation is Helping Forecast the Future - Ep. 266

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Artificial intelligence is powering a new generation of physically accurate models and simulations that are changing the way research and planning are done. In the past few months, we've explored industrial simulation on the podcast, talking about how companies like Siemens are designing and optimizing factories with the help of AI and technologies including digital twins. Today, we're exploring one of the most fascinating and arguably important uses of AI for simulation, climate simulation. Mike Pritchard, director of climate simulation research at NVIDIA, is here to talk about the role of AI in climate science and how AI driven climate modeling is helping us to understand, predict, and prepare for extreme weather and climate change. Mike, welcome, and thank you so much for joining the AI podcast. Thanks so much, Noah. It's great to meet you. So maybe we can start by having you share a little bit about your own journey and how you got into working on climate science. Sure. Well, it was a little windy road for me. You know, I I came out of high school. I'm not sure if I wanted to study, jazz music or or chemistry, and I landed in an astrophysics program and learned about the cosmos and had my first summer job doing astrophysics research. Realized, I I don't really care about how two galaxies are going to collide in fifteen billion years, enough to work on it all summer. And, yeah. So I took a I took a year off traveling halfway through my undergrad. I ended up visiting Bangladesh and, met all these amazing people living so close to sea level rise and then thought back to this course I'd taken on radiative transfer and planetary atmospheres and and realized there's this physics problem that that really matters to the world. And so I haven't looked back since, you know, I did a master's, took a couple of ice sheet simulator to a climate simulator into San Diego to do a PhD studying, the daily cycle of rainfall and how we can simulate rainfall systems and climate models better. And, I eventually realized there's a computer problem here. We just don't we know the equations we'd like to solve. The computers aren't up for it. So any algorithm that could help me get more explicit cloud physics for more realistic storm simulations into, computer models became interesting. And during the 2017, AI became the best the most interesting algorithm to do that. Yeah. Alright. I have to go back and ask before we we continue talking about climate science. Are you a musician? Do you play? I play super casually. Yeah. My jazz chops have dwindled, but, there's a a lovely sunset gig I play in San Diego with someone who loves me play, not too many chords and, and improvise. So, yeah, I love music and and communicating. What's your instrument? I like keyboards. Keyboard's …