The Mathematics of Climate and the Environment
Cargese Summer School 9 – 13 Sep
Deadline for financial support: April 30, 2019
Registration : Please contact sabrina.speich@lmd.ens.fr
Background
Mastering the science of climate and the environment is playing an increasing role in contemporary societies’ endeavors to maintain and increase their well-being. But the complexity of the climate system — and even more so of the entire Earth system, encompassing the biosphere and humans as well — requires the application of multiple scientific disciplines to describe, understand and predict the full system’s behavior. This inherent multidisciplinarity constitutes a serious obstacle in preparing researchers to help a society optimize its adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. A wide range of numerical and statistical tools that use different facets of mathematics is already operational in providing a variety of services in meteorology, oceanography and hydrology.
Modeling the climate system presents additional difficulties because it requires including highly heterogeneous subsystems, and relies on an entire hierarchy of models, from the simplest conceptual ones and on to computer-intensive mega-models with high numerical resolution and a plethora of physical details. Climate models are based on sound physical principles, have demonstrated their capacity to simulate many aspects of the observed climate system, and can be trusted for a number of simple predictions. Still, determining the limits of what the models can potentially predict and the confidence one can have in what they do predict remains an open problem.
More generally, by its universality, mathematics can play a decisive role in bridging the gaps between the disciplines involved in the modern climate and environmental sciences. The increase of the data sets produced by massive simulation and observation of the atmosphere, oceans, land surface and other components of the climate system has led recently to a realization of the opportunities that the mathematical and statistical sciences offer in distilling these data sets into an increase of the system’s actionable understanding.
The aim of the IHP trimester is to follow up on this realization, as represented by the hugely successful Year of Mathematics for Planet Earth held globally in 2013, and the subsequent activities in many countries. The developments in mathematics that seem most promising in advancing the climate and environmental sciences will be presented to the participants, and lead to significant further advances in the methodology and in its applications.
