ERC Starting Grant CausalEarth for Jakob Runge

Climate change and artificial intelligence are two highly hot current research topics and have been increasingly present in the media and politics for several years. Jakob Runge of the Institute of Data Science, German Aerospace Center (DLR), wants to improve our understanding of the climate system by applying novel methods from an important subarea of artificial intelligence: causal inference. The CausalEarth project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant, will develop novel statistical methods of causal inference to move away from correlations to a causal understanding of the interplay of important climate processes - for example, how the Pacific climate phenomenon El Niño influences European climate. By comparing the representation of such processes in climate models with observational data, climate models can be analyzed and our understanding of climate change can be improved.