Mathematicians Network to Tackle Climate Change Issues

The Mathematics and Climate Change Network is led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the UNC Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) providing logistical support and cyber tools to support the creation of a virtual organization spanning the United States. The foundation is providing $1 million annually for five years to support the project.

Representatives of the member institutions are in Chapel Hill Thursday and Friday (Sept. 23-24) for a kickoff meeting at RENCI headquarters.

“The math community is not being properly involved in climate change research,” said Chris Jones, Ph.D., Bill Guthridge Distinguished Professor of Mathematics in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences and principal investigator for the project. “But the fact is, we have only one Earth, so experiments must be done using computer models.”

The network includes faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and students at 13 institutions: UNC-Chapel Hill; UNC Asheville and RENCI at UNC Asheville; Bowdoin College; Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; Arizona State, New York and Northwestern universities; and the universities of California at Berkeley, Chicago, Minnesota, Utah, Vermont and Washington.

The network’s mathematicians will work closely with climate scientists at research centers such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Climatic Data Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The network will tackle problems such as optimizing existing climate models so they more accurately describe climate processes and future climatic conditions, and using mathematical formulas to understand microstructures in natural systems, such as the physical properties of sea ice, its stability and how rapidly it will melt.

Mathematicians will also look at historical changes in climate including sudden, dramatic changes such as the “little ice age” of the 16th to 19th centuries. Sudden, abrupt changes are common in the world of mathematics, Jones said, and studying disruptive climate events will help scientists understand the tipping points that trigger these changes.

Over time, Jones said he hoped the project would make mathematics as integral to climate research as it is to the physics and biology research communities.

“Our charge as mathematicians is not so much to go out and solve the climate change problem, but to develop the mathematical ideas and tools that will be crucial to climate scientists in their work to understand and predict climate changes,” he said.

RENCI website: http://www.renci.org.

RENCI contact: Karen Green, (919) 445-9648, kgreen@renci.org