Zachary Labe is a postdoc researcher at NOAA GFDL and Princeton University who studies climate variability and change. His research uses tools like artificial intelligence and climate models to disentangle the signal of climate change from natural weather noise. He conducts field work including Arctic expeditions and uses supercomputers to run complex climate models that generate huge amounts of data.

1. RESEARCHING AND
COMMUNICATING
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE
@ZLabe
Zachary M. Labe
Postdoc in Seasonal-to-Decadal Variability
& Predictability Division at NOAA GFDL
and AOS at Princeton University
6 December 2023
Mercer County
Community College
https://zacklabe.com/

2. 2004

3. Zack Labe
Pioneer Coal Mine Blue Whale of Catoosa Centralia Underground Fire Roadside America Greenland Sea (81°N)
Enjoy: roadside oddities, diners, and horror movies
Hobbies: gardening, #scicomm ( @ZLabe), hiking, traveling to lighthouses
Graduate work: Arctic – midlatitude climate variability (sea-ice changes)
Recent work: using AI to detect patterns of climate variability/change
Now at GFDL I am thinking about: detection and attribution of extreme events
Hometown – Linglestown,
Pennsylvania
BSc – Atmospheric Science
at Cornell University
PhD – Earth System Science
at UC Irvine
Postdoc – climate variability
using AI at Colorado State U.
Postdoc – climate change
and AI at Princeton/GFDL
he/him

4. The signal (climate change)
The noise (weather)
MY RESEARCH
DISENTANGLES

5. …using tools like artificial intelligence and climate models to understand global climate change
The signal (climate change)
The noise (weather)
MY RESEARCH
DISENTANGLES

6. …using tools like artificial intelligence and climate models to understand global climate change
The signal (climate change)
The noise (weather)
MY RESEARCH
DISENTANGLES

7. Modeling vs. Field Work

8. R/V Lance – Greenland Sea – May 2017

9. ”Cryo-copter”

10. stuck in the sea ice…

12. snow pits

13. isbjørn

14. https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-noaa-launch-new-supercomputer-climate-science-research
Home Laptop – 2,000,000,000 instructions per second
Supercomputer – 5,000,000,000,000,000 instructions per second

15. Adapted from: Kotamarthi, R., Hayhoe, K., Mearns, L., Wuebbles, D., Jacobs, J., & Jurado, J.
(2021). Global Climate Models. In Downscaling Techniques for High-Resolution Climate
Projections: From Global Change to Local Impacts (pp. 19-39). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. doi:10.1017/9781108601269.003
CLIMATE MODELS
Horizontal Grid
Vertical Levels
Past/Present/Future
Fully-Coupled System
20-40 Petabytes of data

19. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-CT) - Time to Wake Up: Climate Progress Speech (3/21/2018)

20. PLOT BY ED HAWKINS
DON’T BE
SUCH A
SCIENTIST
WE ARE
DATA
SCIENTISTS

21. PLOT BY ED HAWKINS

22. Data
visualization is
story-telling!