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A team from the School of Engineering has claimed sixth prize of £5,000 in the Winton Climate Prediction Market competition, which saw academic teams attempt to predict monthly UK temperature and rainfall over six months from April to September 2018.
A team from Oxford University's physics department claimed first prize with the top 10 performing teams sharing £55,000 of cash prizes that went towards their institutions. In total, 24 academic teams from 10 UK universities participated.
The Edinburgh team - STORM - was led by postdoctoral researcher Dr Wei Sun of the Institute for Energy Systems, whose approach outperformed teams from well-known physics and meteorological departments.
Climate Prediction Market
The Climate Prediction Market competition saw 20,000 trades completed, and coincided with the UK's hottest May on record, and second hottest June and July.
Prediction markets are markets that are explicitly designed to reveal and aggregate information. They can be used to produce consensus forecasts based on the judgments of multiple experts.
The market generated joint probability distributions for rainfall and temperature, incorporating information about the relationship between them, rather than simply producing distinct probability forecasts for each variable.
The Climate Prediction Market's design could itself be applied to longer-range climate prediction, as well as non-climate phenomenon.
