Data Assimilation Research Team Events / Media

Prof. Upmanu Lall (Columbia University)

Taming the Storm: Can We Predict, Engineer, and Reduce Losses from Climate and Weather Extremes?

Climate and weather extremes - storms, heat waves, floods, droughts, and compound events - have become the defining natural hazard challenge of the 21st century. Their growing frequency and intensity are overwhelming engineered infrastructure, disrupting global supply chains, and propagating risks across societies through teleconnections that no single country can insulate itself against. While climate change mitigation through decarbonization remains an urgent priority, even optimistic emissions trajectories leave us facing decades of increasing exposure. Climate adaptation efforts - improved infrastructure design, financial instruments, early warning systems - are essential but are constrained by limited data, deep uncertainty in future projections, and the diffuse question of who bears responsibility for action. This talk argues that a third pillar is emerging and demands serious scientific and institutional attention: Stabilization, or the deliberate modification of developing weather and climate extremes to reduce their societal impact. Rather than waiting for disasters to unfold and recovering afterward, this paradigm asks whether the physical dynamics of the atmosphere offer leverage points - windows in time and space - where strategically placed, small perturbations could redirect the trajectory of an extreme event. This is the core idea of Weather Jiu-Jitsu: exploiting the inherent instabilities and nonlinear sensitivities of atmospheric circulation to achieve large-scale redirection of an extreme using energy borrowed from the circulation itself, not brute-force external forcing.

The talk will address the foundational questions this agenda raises for a forecasting and Earth science community: What physical mechanisms enable or constrain atmospheric steering? How can ensemble prediction systems, adjoint methods, and emerging AI tools be harnessed to identify intervention points and compute impact outcomes with spatial specificity? What are the data and modeling gaps? How do we frame the ethical and governance dimensions as this moves from laboratory curiosity to potential operational deployment and commercial application? I will sketch a research roadmap integrating chaos-informed perturbation theory to AI-enabled adaptive control optimization that builds on AI-accelerated impact forecasting to provide the foundation for Climate Stabilization as a rigorous scientific enterprise and, within a decade, a viable business with measurable returns to investors and societies alike. We hope that this will stimulate discussion with RIken's Moonshot Goal 8 program, which is exploring similar scientific and technological frontiers.