Plus Magazine Podcast on ‘A 60% chance of rain: Weather, climate, and how to deal with uncertainty’, an interview with Professor Tim Palmer 

Following on from an Open for Business event hosted by the Newton Gateway, in the latest Plus Magazine Podcast, the Plus team interviewed Professor Tim Palmer, Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, and a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin Institute at the University of Oxford.  

Tim was a speaker at the Open for Business event on From Dispersive Hydrodynamics to Forecasting, Machine Learning and Back, which took place in October 2022 and was part of a six month research programme at the Isaac Newton Institute on Dispersive hydrodynamics: mathematics, simulation and experiments, with applications in nonlinear waves. This hybrid Open for Business event focused on applications of Dispersive Hydrodynamics related to Weather & Climate Forecasting and Oceanography as well as Random Networks and Machine Learning with an aim to bring together mathematicians and scientists working at the forefront of Dispersive Hydrodynamics and its applications, with end users from industry to further investigate potential connections. Tim’s talk covered Two Important Roles for AI in Weather/Climate Prediction. The full recording and slides can be found on the event Programme.  

Following the Open for Business event, Tim was invited for a podcast interview. The Plus team speak to Tim about his call for a "CERN for climate change" and why climate forecasting requires so much computing power in the first place. Tim describes a technique for dealing with uncertainty called ensemble forecasting, and what his work has taught him about uncertainty more generally, as it crops up in many areas of life and nature. Tim also discusses his new book on the science of uncertainty, The primacy of doubt, which is published by Oxford University Press.  

Follow this link to listen to the interview.