It is my second time at the International Meeting on Statistical Climatology (IMSC) after I have been on the previous conference in Canmore, Canada. This time it is hosted by Meteo France in Toulouse in Southern France. The main topic of the week will not necessary be the statistics, but mainly the weather, with the little heat wave which is announced for later this week.
But until we come to that we start with statistics. After collecting the badges, the conference kicked of with a look at Homogenisation and Machine Learning. Especially the latter will be most likely a big topic of this conference. Due to its increased visibility in its application in data science also the climate community gives Machine Learning a go and apply it to some applications.
After the plenary session on those topics it switched to three parallel sessions, which will be also the pattern for the rest of the week. I chose the changes in extremes session and went on to some homogenisation talks in the latter part. For the final session I visited the big data session, which showed several statistical approaches to look at larger datasets in different forms. The day ended with the obligatory ice breaker.
We will see how the topics will evolve over the week. Today I was surprised to hear topological approaches in several talks. In connection with Machine Learning some obviously see it as a big thing. And yes, since we are in France, I am looking forward for great food. Today was already a good start, finger food in many different versions was on offer during the session breaks.
More than just data 