Excerpt and Photo Credit from umt.edu
MISSOULA – The melting Greenland ice sheet and glaciers contribute significantly to global sea level rise. Now two University of Montana researchers are using advanced neural networks, machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve climate models to better predict the threat to coastal areas.
Assistant Professor Jacob Downs and Associate Professor Doug Brinkerhoff are faculty members in UM’s Department of Computer Science. They earned a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to train neural nets on historical data, which should build capacity to project future glacier evolution.
Neural networks are highly flexible computational models loosely inspired by the human brain, Downs said. Just as human brains use interconnected neurons to process information, these networks transform complex data to detect underlying patterns.