September 25, 2023

Episode 5: Tapio Schneider

1 hour 45 minutes

Growing up outside Braunschweig, just on the west side of the border with East Germany during the Cold War, Tapio Schneider spent a lot of his teenage years doing sports, and skiing (often just meters away from the East German border patrol) became a large part of his life.

He also had a keen interest in science and a desire to understand the world around him, and so he decided to study physics and math—he did that at the University of Freiburg, a school he picked in no small part due to its close proximity to the Black Forest, which meant that he could continue to ski as much as possible.

Science became more and more important to him though, and after he came to the US (with what was supposed to be an exchange fellowship, but Tapio ended up not going back to Germany), his career quickly took off, starting from his PhD with Isaac Held (a previous guest on the podcast) at Princeton and on to his current position at Caltech. The array of topics on which Tapio has made major contributions, and the magnitude and impact of those contributions are astonishing. After his early, field-changing work on the general circulation of the atmosphere, Tapio did a whole set of studies on planetary atmospheres. And then he got into marine stratocumulus, and the parameterization of those clouds in models. This led him to studies of clouds and climate more broadly, and eventually to rethinking how climate models should work from the ground up. On top of that, Tapio’s early work on statistical methods, though just an aside for him, have become hugely influential papers for statisticians and scientists alike.

For the last few years, Tapio has been leading the CliMA project at Caltech. A visionary endeavor, the project aims to bring about a paradigm shift in the way climate models are constructed and used. It advocates for a more holistic approach, making use of observations, machine learning, and high-resolution simulations. The inception of CliMA came from a series of workshops on the future of Earth system modeling.

They ended up being a lot of fun and very interesting. […] Each time, it was like 30-some people, perhaps. So it was fairly small, [and] you could interact intensely with everyone. And we we were just trying to ask the question, “So suppose you don’t have to deal with these layers upon layers of history on climate models, how would you go about building a climate model now if you could?” And it was really meant as a hypothetical at the time. There wasn’t any plan to build a climate model.

The plan came later, and it turned into CliMA. As with any pioneering venture, the road hasn’t always been easy, but Tapio has an exceptional ability to treat challenges just as problems to be solved step-by-step—and to not lose sight of the big picture while doing so.

The interview with Tapio was recorded in December 2022.

Tapio’s website at Caltech

Website of the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA)

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