🎓 Rossbypalooza 2026: Earth System Predictability across Scales

Background

Rossbypalooza is a student-led summer school at the University of Chicago. It is named after the Swedish meteorologist Carl Gustav Rossby and Lollapalooza, the annual music festival of Chicago. Carl Gustav Rossby was the head of the department of meteorology in the University of Chicago when he did his pioneering work on the Rossby waves of Earth’s atmosphere. In the spirit of celebrating climate science with fun, Rossbypalooza brings together people from different fields to understand the climate of Earth and other planets. Check out the past Rossbypalooza held in 2016, 2018, 2022, and 2024!

Rossbypalooza 2026 Focus

This year’s topic is “Earth System Predictability across Scales”. Improving the predictability of the Earth system is essential for enhancing societal resilience to environmental changes. Achieving this requires a deeper understanding of the processes across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales in each component of the Earth system. The field is at a particularly exciting moment due to recent breakthroughs in data-driven forecasting that transform how we approach prediction. These advances, being carefully re-examined and combined with continued progress in physical-based modeling, make this a timely opportunity to revisit fundamental questions about the sources, limits, and opportunities for Earth system predictability across scales.

The summer school aspires to address this pressing need by engaging the next-generation climate scientists and statisticians in cross-cutting research activities and tackling the problem by understanding, practicing, and applying our knowledge of predictability.

Program Structure

The summer school will consist of lecture series by faculty in the first week, introducing their experience of tackling problems related to predictions and risk assessments. However, the focus of the program is a hackathon, where participants will work in groups throughout the two weeks to solve problems in consultation with the faculty members. At the end of the program, participants will present their results and get feedback from the faculty.

This school is open to graduate students and postdocs working in atmospheric, oceanic, sea ice, glacier, and (exo)planetary sciences. Last time, we accepted 31 external students in total. People interested in climate research with applied math or physics background are also encouraged to apply. Please contact us at cm9zc2J5cGFsb296YUB1Y2hpY2Fnby5lZHU= for further details.

Rossbypalooza 2026 Organization Group

Jiacheng Ye, Hsing-Hung Chou, Yaoxuan Zeng, Katharine Rucker, Jiawen Tang, Lichuan Xu, Noboru Nakamura, Tiffany Shaw, and Pedram Hassanzadeh.