"So far there has been so many interesting talks, for example, the presentation from Augusto de Nachimento on collection data on the glaciers. I think that is important work", says Erica Coppola during coffee break at the annual meeting.
Erika Coppola is at her first Bjerknes Annual Meeting as the newest SAC member at the Bjerknes Centre. This is her first time in a SAC board. Coppola comes from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. She works on regional climate modeling, particularly leading the high-resolution model development and coordinating the hydrological model research activities. Coppola especially appreciated the wide range of research presented at the annual meeting.
"The further away from my field, the better. Because they are stimulating my curiosity. I also really enjoyed the work by Dr. Jonathan Rheinlænder about the ice, how thinning ice is transforming sea-ice breakup in the Arctic."
In need of answers
Her motivation for research is more understanding. That we need to understand how and why the climate is changing.
"Now we have reached a point where is it not enough to say that the climate is changing. The frequency of extreme events is increasing, and we need to understand why we see this change in the physics of the event. We must also be able to answer whether climate change is behind different extreme events. The public wants to know if an event like “Boris” in Europe this September was due to climate change and how many such events we can expect in the future", she says.
She finds these questions very interesting at the moment, because they raise awareness and give understanding for what we should expect.
Evolution of machine learning
Coppola started to work on high resolution climate modeling motivated by the need to get a local scale to understand why we have extreme weather events and now she is also working with machine learning to project extreme events at the very local scale.
"This goes back to my past. My PhD dissertation was about machine learning. I was developing a new inversion algorithm from satellite data to estimate the perception in Ethiopia and Zambia. I finished in 2003, but at that point, we had issues with computing resources and knowledge when we reached a certain complexity of the machine learning algorithm. At that time, it was not possible. Then I changed my career path, I went into high resolution modeling. Now, I am also back on machine learning, and it is nice to see the evolution."
Rewarding work
From 2018 until 2021, Coppola contributed as a lead author for IPCCs Sixth Assessment Report. Her job was to coordinate the assessment of regional climate information across all continents and contribute to the development of an updated IPCC risk assessment framework.
"It was a very intense experience, but also an experience that helped me broaden my knowledge, vision and understanding. You have to be ready to commit because it is quite demanding in terms of time and involvement. But overall, it was a very positive experience."