Wed, 14 Oct, 2026, 10:57 pm
Reported by today.ucsd.edu
Watson-Parris and his collaborators have received $2.35 million in funding through the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science for a project that harnesses artificial intelligence to improve climate models. That connection between computational models and observations is a central feature of the work: Rather than relying only on existing data, Watson-Parris and his collaborators plan to use insights from the modeling effort to inform future scientific efforts to measure the ocean.
Climate models are extraordinarily powerful tools, but there are still important processes that are difficult to represent,” said Watson-Parris, who is an assistant professor jointly appointed at UC San Diego’s Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “This support gives us an opportunity to use AI to help learn improved physics from data, identify where new observations could have the greatest value and then go into the ocean and collect those measurements.”
The Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science is a $36 million global initiative supporting researchers and organizations using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. A total of 17 projects were selected among 3,000 submissions from 30 countries, in areas including climate resilience and environmental science as well as health and life sciences.
