Dr Jakob Boyd Pernov’s from the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has secured an Early Career Research Seed Grant of $10,000 from the QUT Resilience Centre, titled “Improving the GEOS-Chem model for biogenic aerosol processes using Southern Ocean and Antarctic observations and machine learning”. The Southern Ocean (SO) and Antarctica is of great importance to global and Australian climate. Climate models, including those informing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), perform particularly poorly in SO/Antarctic region. The models persistently overpredict the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, due to misrepresenting aerosol and cloud processes, causing an overprediction of sea surface temperatures. In this project, I will perform a bias correction of the GEOS-Chem model via machine learning (ML) techniques utilizing a plethora of SO/Antarctic observations of methanesulfonic acid (MSA), a biogenic aerosol component critical for cloud formation. This project will produce a freely available ML model, serving as a valuable tool for the atmospheric community and providing a deeper understanding of biosphere-atmosphere-climate dynamics.