The Community Climate Knowledge and Multimodal Climate AI project seeks to safeguard and foreground the weather and climate knowledges of place-based communities – such as tribes, agricultural communities, counties, and neighborhood associations — while developing systems, processes, and resources that blend such unstructured climate information with the structured data that AI-based climate models currently use.
Research & Programming
Community Climate Knowledge and Multimodal Climate AI
What if weather and climate modeling built upon community expertise to create more localized, specific models?
Overview
Data models are critical to how we understand our weather and climate. Yet, these models have often left out local communities who hold critical weather and climate expertise.
Building on previous work by Ava Birdwell and Drs. Mona Sloane, Antonios Mamalakis, and Charity Nyele, we explore the possibility of integrating diverse climate knowledges in participatory processes to improve climate modeling practices, particularly for localized downscaling.
By integrating unstructured community climate knowledge — such as oral histories or local records — with AI climate models, we seek to strengthen climate modeling practices while building systems in which communities are included and valued.
Aims for this work include more robust, inclusive climate modeling practices; improved processes for integrating community climate knowledges into AI climate models; and an open dataset of community climate knowledge sources.
Project Team
This project, spearheaded by Postdoctoral Fellow Aashka Dave, is a partnership between Sloane Lab, the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, Mamalakis Lab, and Aikyam Lab.
Funding
This project is supported by a Co-Lab Grant from UVA’s Environmental Institute.
In the News
Data Science Team Receives $70,000 Environmental Institute CoLab Grant
UVA Data Science research team received a $70,000 Environmental Institute grant to develop AI climate models that incorporate community knowledge for local decision-making.
From Climate AI to Post-Flood Health Risks: UVA Funds New Environmental Research Projects
Congratulations to DTD Lab members Mona Sloane, Chirag Agarwal, and Aashka Dave, who are among the team recipients of a $70k CoLab grant from UVA's Environmental Institute for a new interdisciplinary project, "Community Climate Knowledge and Multimodal Climate AI”. CoLab grants support projects that represent novel and interdisciplinary approaches required to address some of the most pressing climate crises with high potential for societal impact.
