An EPSRC-focused workshop - ANNOUNCEMENT

CliMathNet will be holding a workshop entitled “Mathematics for Forecasting Environmental Change” 17th March 2014 from midday until 4pm at the University of Exeter.

The EPSRC have released a call for networks in this area and we have plans to build a submission around the key theme of Mathematics and Statistics for Modelling the Variability and Impact of Climate. Further information about the call is available on the EPSRC website: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/2014/Pages/callfornetworks.aspx

Some key speakers will offer thought-provoking insights in areas where the mathematical sciences may be able to offer value and bring new knowledge.

The event will include an opportunity for all participants to consider project ideas and to input into the network’s structure and activities.

Further information and a registration link will be circulated shortly via the CliMathNet newsletter. Please contact Emily Paremain ([log in to unmask]) if you have any queries.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/2014/uk-storms-and-floods

The Met Office and the Centre for Ecology and Hydology have produced a briefing report on the recent storms and floods in the UK. An extract of the report is below.

This paper documents the record -breaking weather and flooding, considers the potential drivers and discusses whether climate change contributed to the severity of the weather and its impacts.

This winter the UK has been affected very severely by an exceptional run of winter storms, culminating in serious coastal damage and widespread, persistent flooding. This period of weather has been part of major perturbations to the Pacific and North Atlantic jet streams driven, in part, by persistent rainfall over Indonesia and the tropical West Pacific. The North Atlantic jet stream has also been unusually strong; this can be linked to exceptional wind patterns in the stratosphere with a very intense polar vortex.

The severe weather in the UK coincided with exceptionally cold weather in Canada and the USA. These extreme weather events on both sides of the Atlantic were linked to a persistent pattern of perturbations to the jet stream over the Pacific Ocean and North America. There is a strong association with the stormy weather experienced in the UK during December and January and the up-stream perturbations to the jet stream over North America and the North Pacific.

As yet, there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to the
recent storminess, rainfall amounts and the consequent flooding. This is in part due to the
highly variable nature of UK weather and climate.

The attribution of these changes to anthropogenic global warming requires climate models of sufficient resolution to capture storms and their associated rainfall. Such models are now becoming available and should be deployed as soon as possible to provide a solid evidence base for future investments in flood and coastal defences.

The second CliMathNet conference will be held from 14-18th July at the Unversity of Leeds.

The conference will address key aims of CliMathNet, including understanding the climate system (dynamics, radiation, clouds, feedbacks, nonlinear processes), quantifying uncertainty in climate models, forecasting extreme events, and novel mathematical and statistical techniques with applications in climate sciences (e.g., numerical methods). The confirmed plenary speakers are Brian Hoskins, Doug Maraun, Tim Palmer, Ted Shepherd, Jonathan Tawn, Claudia Tebaldi, John Thuburn, Laure Zanna, and Mary Lou Zeeman.

Online registration is open at

http://store.leeds.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=100

Abstracts should be submitted to the CliMathNet coordinator Emily Paremain, at [log in to unmask] Abstracts for oral presentations should be submitted by 30th April; abstracts for posters should be submitted by 31st May. Please ensure that the abstracts are a maximum of 500 words, and if any special characters are to be included, please use LaTeX.

Further information and updates are available at the conference website

www.climathnet.org/conference2014

Climate Change 2013 - The Physical Science Basis. The Working Group 1 contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The presentations and audio recordings of the IPCC meeting talks are now available online at the Royal Meteorological Society website:

http://www.rmets.org/events/climate-change-2013-physical-science-basis-working-group-1-contribution-fifth-assessment#

The final 2-day NERC sponsored workshop run in the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Glasgow is on Functional Data Analysis (FDA) for environmental science on 17th and 18th March. The course tutors are Dr Surajit Ray and Professor Marian Scott.

Registration details can be found at http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/mathematicsstatistics/events/details/?id=9182

This workshop is designed introduce the power of functional data analysis methods to environmental scientists. It is intended for postgraduate students, early career researchers but also for others for whom FDA is new but who are keen to learn about how it can be used in environmental sciences.

The workshop will consist of lectures, practical and question and answer session, examples will be drawn from current research of the course tutors but also more generally from the literature. This will include sea surface temperature, chlorophyll and nitrates in rivers, and identifying seasonal patterns in vegetation maps. Workshop participants will:

* Develop new modeling and computing skills through hands-on analyses and lectures - all the analysis will be done in R using the fda package
* Have an opportunity to ask questions and explore how FDA might be useful in their own research

FDA often is used in the analysis of time series data, where the observation is considered to be the entire time series, which can then be represented by a smooth curve representing the underlying environmental process. For the application of FDA, measurements do not need to be made at regularly spaced intervals, and we will typically have many time series.

This workshop follows naturally from the previous two workshops on Advanced regression and spatio-temporal modelling, but no prior knowledge of FDA is assumed. Participants are expected to have attended the previous 1 week training course on statistical methods, or to have equivalent statistical and R knowledge.

Resources: J. O. Ramsay, G. Hooker, and S. Graves, Functional Data Analysis with R and MATLAB. Springer, 2009

Registration should be completed by March 4th. NERC financial support is available for travel and subsistence for NERC sponsored PhD and ECR participants.

Invitation to attend the World Weather Open Science Conference

The first World Weather Open Science Conference (WWOSC 2014 - The weather: what’s the outlook?) will be held in Montréal, Canada from 16 to 21 August 2014.

The overarching theme of WWOSC 2014 is “Seamless Prediction of the Earth System: from minutes to months”. The Conference is structured around two programs:

• The Science Program will cover basic weather research that extends our knowledge of processes and systems as well as applied research needed to put prediction systems together and assess the impacts of weather and climate events.

• The User, Application & Social Science Program will consider the goods and services economy and the role of government in disaster risk reduction and management and the communication of weather information.

Join us at WWOSC 2014 in Montréal to contribute to what promises to be a once in a generation event.
For more information visit wwosc2014.org

Location: UCL Institute of Global Health, 30 Guilford Street, WC1N 1EH
Dates: March 1st & 2nd 2014, 9:30-5:30
Target audience: Students, young people, recent graduates (but anyone welcome!)

"Climate change is the biggest threat to global health of the 21st century." This was the conclusion of a report in the Lancet, a leading medical journal, in 2009. At the same time, there is evidence that policies that benefit the environment often improve health, for example in food, energy and transport policy. These interconnected issues are the defining challenges of this century, and today's students have a crucial role to play in tackling them.

The confirmed speakers at this event include:

Professor Sir Andy Haines, review editor for the health chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 5th Assessment Report;
Professor Virginia Murray, the UK government’s Head of Extreme Events and Health Protection and an editor of the IPCC’s Special Report on Extreme Events;
Dr. Louise Newport, Scientific Policy Manager for Climate Change Adaptation at the UK Department of Health;
Professor Tim Lang (Professor of Food Policy, Centre for Food Policy, City University);
Professor Andrew Watkinson, director of the Living With Environmental Change programme and former director of the Tyndall Centre;
Dr. David Pencheon, Director of the NHS and Public Health England Sustainable Development Unit;
Ms. Rachel Stancliffe, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare, Oxford


Tickets: http://bit.ly/1jogqgP
More info & speakers: http://www.healthyplanetuk.org/conference.html
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/726253360732782/

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