West Michigan Big Data Meetup

At 6 PM, Dr. Xiao will present on Big Data and Climate Modeling. Dr. Xiao works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) in Ann Arbor. He specializes in hydro-climatology and climate change in the Great Lakes region using regional numerical climate models. As a climate modeler, Dr. Xiao deals with “Big Meteorological Data” from in-situ observation stations, buoys, radars, satellites, and mostly numerical models. He uses a sophisticated regional climate model (written in Fortran) to conduct century-scale simulations and projections (terabyte scale) of the hydroclimatology in Great Lakes region in terms of precipitation, temperature, ice coverage, river discharge, lake level, etc, with post-processing done by using analysis and visualization programming tools (e.g. NCL, R and Python). Dr. Xiao’s presentation should be an interesting source of ideas for data scientists and data analysts in other fields because climate modelers have developed and employ special methods of working with big data.”