This project will develop a Climate Math Web Portal housed on the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) web pages. The web portal is an important component of a long-term initiative to facilitate high-level collaboration between mathematicians and climate scientists to solve some of the deeply mathematical problems in climate change research. The specific objectives of the proposed web portal are three-fold:
1. Introduce some of the mathematical challenges and opportunities in climate change research to the broadest mathematical audience possible. 2. Introduce the language, mathematics and central results of climate change research in a way that is designed to jump-start the learning of an active mathematics audience. 3. Share resources for education in Climate Math at levels ranging from graduate training to introductory undergraduate courses.
An interdisciplinary Advisory Board will be established to oversee development of the web portal, and experts will be invited to write expository introductions and annotated bibliographies for simple climate and process models. Matlab code will be posted for simple models. The portal will also introduce and provide access to archives of IPCC model output and other data, and will collect educational materials ranging from recommended reading lists for graduate seminars to worksheets based on climate data for introductory undergraduate classes.
Global warming, and the associated changes in extreme weather patterns, sea level, fresh water supply and habitat ranges raise urgent policy questions from the local to international levels. Answers to these questions depend on impact predictions of climate models for the particular region in question, over the next 50-100 years. But there are critical stumbling blocks in climate modeling, of a deeply mathematical nature, that currently prevent climate scientists from making impact predictions at the level of accuracy required to inform policy decisions. Development of the web portal will provide an infrastructure that helps to bring the full power of mathematics to research at the interface of mathematics and climate science, to address some of the most pressing questions facing climate modeling, and hence society.
