Cathie and her team with Paul, Nancy, Ian, Dante, have won the STEM Research Project of the Year trophy at the Times Higher Education Awards 2022.

The formal MPE CDT programme has now to come to end. Our final event was held at Imperial College on 30 September. It was a very enjoyable day and we were delighted to be joined by so many former MPE students and staff. It was great to hear what everyone is doing and a wonderful opportunity to see people who, in some cases, had not met up in person since before the first lockdown.

Several of the MPE former students gave updates on their careers since they graduated from the CDT.

The afternoon was devoted to roundtable discussion groups that focussed on reviewing the students’ experiences of being a part of the MPE CDT and on looking forward to a future bid for a new CDT. It was great to hear how much the students had enjoyed and gained from their time at Imperial College and the University of Reading, and to obtain ideas and suggestions from both staff and former students that we will incorporate into the next CDT bid.

We all vowed to keep in touch in future and will be issuing news about how we will do this soon…..

The Demonstrator was made by Professor Onno Bokhove as part of the Data Assimilation for the REsilient City (DARE) research project and network funded by an EPSRC Senior Fellowship in Digital Technology for Living with Environmental Change. https://research.reading.ac.uk/dare/

Professor Bokhove said:
“Over the last 8 years I have had the pleasure to heavily interact with students and staff of the Mathematics of Planet Earth Centre for Doctoral Training (MPE CDT) on the mathematics and numerics of geophysical and environmental fluid dynamics, with applications in flooding, wave-energy and extreme water waves at sea. I have enjoyed reading CDT students’ reports as external examiner and facing critical questions in the various seminars given for the MPE CDT. In addition, whilst not on call to check on Wetropolis during the MPE exhibition, I loved exploring the river-scape of London’s Thames from Hammersmith to the Thames Barrier. Pondering how to make an urban-estuary version of Wetropolis in which river floods meet a tidal storm surge.” 

The video of the “Exploring Wetropolis, an extreme rainfall and flood demonstrator”, part of Reading’s DARE project and featuring Oliver Phillips (MPE CDT PhD student) and Onno, underscores the fruitful collaborations between the Universities of Leeds and Reading and Imperial College London:

The video can be viewed here:

Read the full blog here:

Cathie has provided this summary:

In the SIAM Online article we look at different ways to plan flight trajectories across the North Atlantic, between John F Kennedy Airport in New York (JFK) and London Heathrow Airport (LHR), in order to reduce CO₂ emissions. With commercial aviation currently responsible for 5% of all anthropogenic climate change, it is important that we find immediate ways to reduce aviation fuel use and thus emissions. This is offered by improved trajectory planning, taking advantage of wind conditions and a new satellite communications network.

We consider the problem through the framing of Optimal Control Theory and use two different ways to reach a solution.  In the first instance time minimal trajectories at fixed altitude and airspeed are considered, enabling the corresponding optimal control problem to be solved using Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle. This method relies on optimisation of the initial system, before discretisation to allow for an approximate numerical solution. When looking at fuel optimisation for a fixed-time flight, we instead discretise the system first and find the control variables which give the minimum value of a cost functional at each time interval, subject to a non-linear constraint.  From these the corresponding states of a fuel minimal trajectory can be retrieved.

Using time minimal optimisation we show that large savings in emissions are possible by changing to trajectory based operations, compared with the current tactic of limiting aircraft to the Organised Track Structure. Research into different formulations of fuel-optimal routing highlights the importance of controlling both airspeed and heading angle, rather than just heading angle.

To this end, the workshop will focus on two main themes:

• Turbulence on day 1 
• Dynamics and Transfer Operator Theory on day 2 .  

Topics of the conference include:

• Out-of-equilibrium dynamics
• Spatio-temporal chaos
• Periodic Orbit Theory
• Critical transitions (tipping points) in high-dimensional systems
• Rare, extreme and persistent events and large deviations.

This conference to be in-person and there will also be the opportunity to register for online attendance. 

The conference will include poster sessions and social events. Applications are particularly encouraged from early career researchers and PhD students.

More information, including details about registration, are here.

Geophysical fluid dynamics; from mathematical theory to operational prediction

at University of Reading

A month-long programme of talks, activities and workshops

A better understanding of the climate system is of great societal relevance, due to the importance of reliable environmental forecasts and the looming climate crisis. Recent scientific progress ranges from improving operational forecasting systems to abstract results on infinite dynamical systems. it is of vital importance to bring theses insights together in a proper interdisciplinary environment, which this programme aims to provide. With a focus on the fluid dynamical components of the climate system, practitioners will learn from mathematicians and statisticians about new tools and techniques to analyse these, while at the same time interesting new challenges for the mathematical community will emerge. The programme will address questions relating to geophysical fluid dynamics and forecasting, such as qualitative and statistical behaviour of geophysical models, response to deterministic and stochastic perturbations, sources of predictability at different spatial and temporal scales, forecast verification, and data assimilation. We will be taking both mathematical and statistical perspectives as well as applied and operational perspectives at the same time.

Full details, including how to take part, are here: here.

This year the chapter conference is happening in person again (fingers crossed), and in addition to three senior speakers we will also host student speakers, so if you want to take the chance and present your work at this year’s conference, feel free to fill out the form or contact us personally.

Full details and information on how to register are here: https://www.reading.ac.uk/maths/siamstudentchapter/

Speakers for the Symposium include: Alberto Naveira Garabato (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton), Marilena Oltmanns (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton), Wei Pan (ICL), Pauline Tedesco (ICL), Matthew Crowe (University College London) and Laura Cimoli (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego).

Please note: talks will take place at Room Huxley 340 at Imperial College and a welcome lunch at 170 Queen’s Gate. There will be also be a social BBQ dinner for MPE staff, students and invited guests after at 170 Queen’s Gate.

Please register for the event and lunch through this link here by 9th May.

Please download the flyer here.

Article on Paulina’s achievement can be found here.

• Event attribution

• Trend attribution

• Philosophical issues in attribution

• Causality

• Decision-making

The school is primarily aimed at MPE CDT graduate students but is open to a wider audience of scientists and scholars in mathematics and weather and climate science, including climate services. Scheduled activities are expected to occur between 10am and 5pm UK time, and will occur entirely online. The provisional schedule of lectures and practical sessions can be downloaded here. A more detailed syllabus, together with suggested background reading, will be provided later.

The lectures and practical sessions will be delivered by leading experts, including Aglaé Jézéquel (LMD/IPSL), Sebastian Sippel (ETH Zürich), Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana), Marlene Kretschmer (Reading), Elena Saggioro (Reading), Dragana Bojovic (BSC), Raül Marcos (BSC), and Marta Terrado (BSC).

The school is co-sponsored by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) through its Lighthouse Activity ‘My Climate Risk’, and by the Walker Institute.

In order to benefit from the school, participants should have some basic background in weather and climate science, some knowledge of common statistical practices such as regression and uncertainty quantification, and some experience in scientific programming with either python or R.

We ask potential participants to indicate their interest by May 2nd, by completing this form. Successful applicants will be informed by Mid May and provided with joining information.

SYLLABUS FOR THE SCHOOL

MONDAY JUNE 6

Event attribution Aglaé Jézéquel 

Concepts of extreme event attribution :

• How do we define the event?
• Counterfactual and factual worlds
• Storyline and risk-based approach
• Attributing impacts related to extreme events
• Compound events attribution

Trend attribution I Sebastian Sippel 

Concepts of detection and attribution for long-term trends:

• Detection: Is there a change?
• Attribution: What is the reason for the change?
• Internal variability vs. forced response
• Separation of (forced) signal and noise
• Climate models as physics-based tools to identify an expected change signal (which observational changes will be tested against)  
• “Fingerprinting” of individual forcings (in spatial, temporal, vertical and/or multi-variate climate patterns) and traditional attribution “recipe”
• Key attribution results (e.g., from IPCC AR6 WG1)

Logic of model confirmation Lisa Lloyd

• Varieties of ways that models might be supported
• Fit
• Variety of Fit
• Independent support for aspects of the model
• Variety of independent support
• Robustness
  

Role of values in attribution Lisa Lloyd 

• Why values are always there
• Why that is not bad
• How to use values to help good science
• Tradeoffs of values in scientific investigation and practice

TUESDAY JUNE 7

Practical session on event attribution Aglaé Jézéquel 

Simple case study of EEA – calculation of a risk ratio

Causality I Marlene Kretschmer 

• Causal questions in climate science with a focus on teleconnections
• Association vs. causation
• The concept of causality in statistics: quantifying causal relationships from (observed) data
• Using causal networks to express scientific hypotheses
• Examples from climate science: common drivers, mediating pathways, direct and indirect effects, linear and non-linear causal effects

Trend attribution II Sebastian Sippel 

“New approaches” to detection and attribution (e.g., at regional scales):

• Dynamical adjustment: Separation of thermodynamical vs. dynamical trends as a tool to assess causes of regional-scale trends
• Statistical learning approaches to identify (forced) signals from climate patterns (e.g., pattern filtering, infilling, and/or pattern recognition, …)

WEDNESDAY JUNE 8

Practical session on causality Elena Saggioro 

Set of exercises on simple causal network structures and associated potential statistical pitfalls: common driver, mediators, indirect pathways, blocking pathways and non-linear causal effects.

THURSDAY JUNE 9

Causality II Marlene Kretschmer 

• Conditioning on a common effect: an example from climate science
• Particular challenges and opportunities in the use of causal networks in scientific practice
• Outlook: causal discovery
  

Decision-making Aglaé Jézéquel 

• How do we interact with stakeholders as climate scientists ?
• Interdisciplinarity with social sciences 
• Climate services : definitions, objectives and limits
• Case study of extreme event attribution as a climate service

Practical session on decision-making Raül Marcos, Marta Terrado and Dragana Bojovic

• A journey from climate information to decision-making: a tale of two worlds?

FRIDAY JUNE 10

Decision-making I: Knowledge coproduction  Dragana Bojovic

• Decision-making for climate change adaptation
• Involving stakeholders in decision-making
• Participatory methods 
• Climate services and need for transdisciplinary approaches
  

Decision-making II: Success story Marta Terrado 

• Coproduction of a climate service with a wine sector user 
• MED-GOLD Dashboard: a decision-making tool for the wine sector (different time scales: historical, seasonal, projections) 
• Translating skill to economic value, hit rate of the prediction: the weather roulette 
  

Lecturers and Support Specialists – Biographies

Dragana Bojovic is a senior researcher at Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Earth Science Department, where she co-leads the Knowledge integration team. She applies interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to improve climate knowledge and coproduce climate services. She has been collaborating with scientists, policymakers, and communities from different parts of the world, supporting knowledge exchange to enhance resilience to climate and other environmental changes. She holds a PhD in Science and Management of Climate Change (Ca’Foscari University of Venice) and a MSc in Environmental Change and Management (Oxford University). 

Aglaé Jézéquel is a researcher working at LMD in Paris. Her research interests include extreme event attribution, storylines, and climate services. Her work is interdisciplinary, between statistics of climate data and social sciences. She also teaches several classes at masters level, including a creative writing workshop on climate change in collaboration with a French writer.

Marlene Kretschmer is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading. Before that she worked at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany where she received her PhD in climate physics. Her research focuses on identifying the large-scale atmospheric drivers of extreme weather and climate events, including dynamical stratosphere-troposphere coupling and its impacts for winter circulation and extremes. To address these issues, she is particularly interested in applying causal inference-based frameworks as well as novel statistical approaches from machine learning such as causal discovery algorithms.  Moreover, she is keen on applying these new techniques to evaluate teleconnection processes in climate models and to improve sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasting of extreme events.

Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science working on models in science and their confirmation in evolutionary biology, started studying climate science and how it uses models in 2005. Since then, she has worked on a variety of key issues involving modeling questions, including model confirmation and model application in the context of attribution, and is especially interested in the development of attribution methods and the social values they hold. She has held faculty positions at University of California, Berkeley, and is now a Distinguished Professor at the specialty department in her field at Indiana University. A few weeks ago she found out she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Raül Marcos-Matamoros is a Serra Húnter lecturer in Meteorology at the Barcelona University and a fellow researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) – Earth Science Department. In the BSC he collaborates with the Climate Services team where he is involved in the verification of seasonal prediction models and the development of climate services in different sectors (agriculture, forest fire prevention, water resources and renewable energies). He also works in the interaction with stakeholders to promote the integration of climate predictions in their decision-making workflows. He holds a PhD in Physics (University of Barcelona) and a MsC in Meteorology. 

Elena Saggioro is an interdisciplinary research fellow at the Walker Institute, and is completing her PhD in Mathematics of Planet Earth at the University of Reading. Her PhD research focused on applying a range of causal and Bayesian network methods to understanding the Southern Hemisphere stratosphere-troposphere coupling and its role in extending the predictability of large-scale tropospheric circulation variability. At the Walker Institute, she is exploring how causality and climate storylines can help in climate risk assessment and climate adaptation planning. Her work involves close engagement with a range of stakeholders, including national governments and public bodies in the UK and overseas.

Sebastian Sippel’s key research interests include improving understanding of climate variability, extremes, and their changes at global and regional scales, including land-atmosphere interactions and changes in ecosystem carbon cycling. Sebastian uses statistical learning techniques with a focus on identifying forced changes and internally generated variability. Sebastian works as a Senior Scientist (“Oberassistent”) and Lecturer in the Climate Physics group at ETH Zurich. Sebastian’s PhD research was on “Climate extremes and their impact on ecosystem-atmosphere interactions” at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. Before that, he studied environmental sciences with a focus on environmental physics at Bayreuth University, Germany; with a year abroad in Oxford with studies on Environmental Change and Management.

Marta Terrado is a senior researcher and science communicator at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Earth Sciences department, where she co-leads the Knowledge Integration team. Applying various communication and dissemination tools and activities, she facilitates knowledge and technology exchange on climate services and air quality services to stakeholders from different sectors and governance levels to support their adaptation to climate change. She is an Environmental Scientist with a PhD in Earth Sciences (University of Barcelona), a MSc in Geographical Information Systems and a Postgraduate Degree in Science Communication.

Timetable

BSC Team = Dragana Bojovic, Raül Marcos, Marta Terrado