Bobby Jackson
Bobby Jackson is an atmospheric scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. His research interests include radar meteorology, using AI and edge computing to improve atmospheric observations, and open source software development for the atmospheric sciences. He is a lead developer on PySP2 and PyDDA, two open source Python packages for aerosol and radar wind retrievals. In addition, he is a contributing developer to numerous packages in the Pangeo and Open Source Radar communities, including PyART.
Session
The advent of multimodal large language models (mLLMs) provides new opportunities for automated data exploration tasks on multi-petabyte atmospheric data sets. In this presentation, we present Nepho, a Python package for parallel mLLM prompting on collections of atmospheric quicklook data plots. We then evaluate the accuracy of several mLLMs in answering questions about Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) atmospheric datasets. We demonstrate that the GPT 4/5 and llama3-vision models were the most accurate models for quicklook plot exploration and recommend prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation for such data exploration workflows.