Why Models Need Data—and Why Data Need Models

Forecasting the future sounds like the hard part, but it is also very difficult to just know what is happening now. In this lecture we will cover how we can get reliable initial conditions from noisy data using data assimilation. This is the tenth lecture in Nan Chen and I's video series where we explore short insights into big questions. This series is based on a joint work: "An Applied Mathematics Perspective on Modern Geosciences" by Nan Chen, Reza Malek-Madani, Pedram Hassanzadeh, Samuel N. Stechmann, Amy Braverman, Hannah Christensen, Anne Gelb, Michael Ghil, Dimitris Giannakis, Chris Jones, Ruby Leung, Matthias Morzfeld, Charlotte Moser, Tim Palmer, Christian Sampson, Themistoklis Sapsis, Tiffany Shaw, Andrew Stuart, Jonathan Weare, Laure Zanna. We thank all collaborators for their contributions. We would like to give a special thank you to Dr. Reza Malek-Madani for his helpful discussions and feedback on the video series.