LEAP Education

Climate Prediction Challenges

Spring 2022 (Syllabus)

A project-based learning course where teams of climate science and data science students collaborate to create machine learning predictive models for challenges inspired by LEAP's research

Shortcuts: Project 1 | Project 2 | Project 3

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Project cycle 1: Jupyter Notebook for Exploratory Data Analysis

(starter codes)

Week 1 (Jan 18)

• Introduction to LEAP CPC (Zheng)
• Introduction to Earth Systems and Climate Change (McKinley)
• Project 1 description Hurricanes and Clime Change starts
  • A tutorial on Google Colab
• Team activities
  • Self introduction and a fun fact
  • The LEAP crossword challenge
  • Find a time to review and discuss project 1 materials as a group

Week 2 (Jan 25)

• Tutorial on EDAV (Zheng)
• A deep dive into Project 1
• Project 1 starter codes (Jiaxu Li)
• Discussion and Q&A

Week 3 (Feb 1)

• Presentation and submission instruction (Zheng)
• Team lightning shares
• Discussion and Q&A

Week 4 (Feb 8)

• Project 1 presentations

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Shortcuts: Shortcuts: Project 1 | Project 3

Project cycle 2: Physics-Informed Machine Learning

(starter codes)

Week 4 (Feb 8)

• Project 2 starts.
• Introduction to Project 2 (McKinley and Zheng)

Week 5 (Feb 15)

• [Tutorial] The physics of temperature stratification (McKinley)
• [Tutorial] A deep dive into Project 2's PGML (Zheng)
• Project 2 starters codes
• Discussion and Q&A

Week 6 (Feb 22)

• [Tutorial] More on energy conservation (McKinley)
• Brainstorming, Discussion and Q&A

Week 7 (Mar 1)

• Discussion and Q&A

Week 8 (Mar 8)

• Project 2 presentations

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Shortcuts: Project 1 | Project 2

Project cycle 3: Predictive Modeling

(starter codes)

Week 9 (Mar 22)

• Project 3 starts.
• Climate Science Tutorial on "Air-Sea Flux of CO2" (McKinley)
• Discussion and Q&A

Week 10 (Mar 29)

• Tutorial on decision tree, random forests and xgboost (Zheng)
• Review of starter codes (Xiaoshu Zhao)
• Discussion of papers and Q&A

Week 11 (Apr 5)

• Q&A on starter codes (Xiaoshu Zhao)
• Discussion of research ideas

Week 12 (Apr 12)

• Tutorials on explainable AI (Zheng)
• Q&A on research ideas (McKinley)

Week 13 (Apr 19)

• Guest lecture on LEAP's vision
• Q&A

Week 14 (Apr 26)

• Project 3 submission and presentations

Shortcuts: Shortcuts: Project 1 | Project 3