CESOC/ELLIS Workshop: How Resolution Matters – The Future of AI Climate Modelling
Florentine Weber
We would like to invite you to participate in our upcoming CESOC/ELLIS workshop “How Resolution Matters: The Future of AI Climate Modelling” supported by the HClimRep project, the CESOC ML Working Group and the ELLIS Unit NRW.
Why does resolution matter?
One of the big questions facing the future of AI-based climate modelling is deceptively simple: How much resolution do we actually need?
In numerical climate modelling, higher resolution generally means better representation of weather and small-scale processes — but also dramatically higher computational and energy costs. AI climate models, meanwhile, are showing promising results at coarser resolutions, and emerging evidence suggests that downscaling may be able to add credible small-scale features afterwards.
Could this fundamentally change how we build climate models in the future? If we can reliably capture the relevant large-scale dynamics at coarse resolution and reconstruct the small scales afterwards, we could potentially save enormous amounts of compute and energy while still obtaining high-resolution information.
But there is a crucial question: will this remain physically meaningful in a changing climate? Small-scale processes are tightly coupled to large-scale dynamics, and we still need to understand whether AI models can capture these relationships well enough — and whether they will generalise beyond the climates they were trained on.
This is where we need the community. The workshop will bring together experts in atmospheric physics, numerical climate modelling, and AI to tackle these questions from different perspectives. We want to understand what we already know, identify the most important gaps, and — most importantly — discuss what future AI climate models should look like and which strategies could make them both reliable and computationally sustainable.
Agenda:
08:30 Registration
09:00 Welcome Message (Martin Schultz and Agnes Lohs)
09:10 Invited Perspective Talks: 4 talks of 15 min + 5 min discussion
10:30 Coffee Break
10:50 Short Lightning Talks: up to 10, 3 min each
11:20 Invited Perspective Talks: 2 talks of 15 min + 5 min discussion
12:00 Plenary Discussion; first replies to perspectives and lightning talks
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Planning of Breakout Sessions
13:45 Breakout Sessions
14:45 Coffee Break
15:15 Plenary Report of Breakout Sessions and Discussion
16:00 Final Plenary Discussion and Wrap-up
16:30 End of event
We are very much looking forward to bringing this community together in Cologne. We are especially excited about active participation, including talks, questions, and lively discussions — this workshop should be a place to challenge assumptions, connect perspectives, and hopefully leave with some new ideas for where AI climate modelling needs to go next.
Please reach out to us if you are interested to give a lightning talk during the event.
Language:
This event will be held in English.
Date:
Friday, 6 November 2026, 08:30 – 16:30
Venue:
InnoDom Cologne, Weyertal 109, 50931 Cologne-Lindenthal
Registration:
Please note that there are two separate registration forms: one for in-person participation and one for online participation. When registering, please select the form corresponding to your preferred mode of participation.
The registration deadline is for in-person registrations is the 20 of October. The registration deadline for online registrations is the 03 of November.
We strongly encourage participants to attend the workshop in person in Cologne, as this will provide the best opportunity for interaction and discussion. However, online participation is also available for those who are unable to attend in person.
Please register here: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/335/
Contact:
Dr. Florentine Weber
Project Manager for the WeatherGenerator and RAINA Science Coordinator for the Center for Earth System Observation and Computational Analysis (CESOC)
- Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)
Room 4002