Tutorial 12. Cross-disciplinary Physics for Understanding Climate
ANCILLARYEVENT · MAR-12T · ID: MAR-12T
Lectures will provide concrete, recent examples of how basic scientific discovery has made progress in understanding complex, nonlinear problems in climate physics. Four pedagogical lectures will cover new contributions to climate science that required sophisticated applications of tools from other branches of physics:
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These disciplines are represented by other divisions in the APS, but provide essential foundations for understanding the climate system.
Topics Covered: Each lecture will start with an extensive introduction and then discuss open questions in climate physics, including how waves propagate in a fluid on a sphere, what determines the rate of atmospheric warming as a function of carbon dioxide abundance, ice sheets as soft matter, and how numerical models can translate physical understanding into precise forecasts for sparsely observed regions. Speakers will also address how climate change is a particularly difficult problem in climate physics, and describe how their field is tackling it.
Attendees will be introduced to publicly available datasets and resources that allow them to conduct their own exploration of the climate system.
This tutorial will illustrate how difficult problems in climate physics are simultaneously difficult problems in other branches of physics, requiring the breadth of expertise in the APS. It will serve as an interactive invitation for APS members to consider joining the GPC and pursuing transdisciplinary research in climate.
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