CATS eNews 2012 Issue 3 (October)
Welcome to two new members who joined CATS at the beginning of October: Erica Thompson as a Research Officer on the Munich Re Programme 'Evaluating the Economics of Climate Risks and Opportunities in the Insurance Sector', and Ewelina Sienkiewicz who is beginning a PhD on 'Defining the limits of climate modelling: When to downscale'.
This quarter, we bring you updates on the Centre's activities over the past few months, as well as highlighting some upcoming dates for your diary.
As ever, please do keep the CATS administrative team up to date with all of your CATS-related activities!
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New appointments: Congratulations to Emma Suckling, who was recently elected to the committee for the Institute of Physics Nonlinear and Complex Physics Group. CATS Visiting Fellows Jochen Broecker has joined the University of Reading as a lecturer in Statistics and Meterology. Milena Cuellar, also a CATS Visiting Fellow, has been appointed to the City University of New York as an Assistant Professor in Mathematics, Engineering and Compuer Science.
CATS Visiting Fellow Dr Jerome Ellepola and his co-authors of 'Development of a synthesis tool for Gas To Liquid Complexes', were invited to submit their paper and have been shortlisted for the prestigious ENI Awards for their pioneering work in developing the Process Synthesis Tool (PST) at Shell. The tool is used to steer and direct the development of future Gas to Liquid plant designs. Dr Ellepola leads the technical development of the tool which was the brainchild of Nort Thijssen, Prof. Johan Grievink and Jan van Schijndel back in 2007.
The Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at LSE is seeking to appoint a Post-Doctoral Research Officer to contribute to the AHRC funded Research Project Managing Severe Uncertainty. For more information click here.
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Each issue we ask one researcher to contribute a short update on their recent research progress.
Erica Thompson is Research Officer working on the Munich Re Programme, and is a new addition to the CATS team:
"I have just joined CATS this month, having finished my PhD at Imperial College last month. My thesis is about the relative (and absolute) merits of different approaches to modelling extratropical storms in the North Atlantic. Because climate models don't all agree on the magnitude or even sign of future changes in storm characteristics, the North Atlantic is an interesting case study for thinking about how best to proceed in a situation with many unknowns.
Scientific inference about the real climate system from the modelled system depends on a series of subjective assumptions; I have tried to illustrate and clarify those assumptions using the detailed example of the North Atlantic, from which we may also draw more general conclusions about the difficulty of modelling complex systems and interpreting the outputs that are generated.
I hope to look at some similar topics in the next few months and am looking forward to working with the rest of the CATS team."
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Oct 20-11 Nov: Lewis Mitchell, a postdoc of Chris Danforth at the University of Vermont will be visiting CATS.His work is focused on data assimilation in slow-fast systems with stochastic model error.
12-16 Nov: Leonard Smith and Emma Suckling will present talks at the International Conference on Ensemble Methods in Geophysical Sciences in Toulouse. Leonard is on the Scientific Organising Committee and will present a talk entitled ‘Guidance Information or Probability Forecast: Where do Ensembles Aim?'. Emma will be talking about Pseudo-orbit gradient descent ensemble methods.
21 Nov: CATS and CCCEP will be hosting the Munich Re Programme Symposium on 'Insurance in emerging markets: Determinants of growth and the case of climate change?'. The Symposium is being led by Dr. Swnja Surminski.
3-7 Dec: Leonard Smith will be speaking at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco. His invited talk will be on Queuing the wrong U?. He will giuve a second talk enetitled Increasing the relevance of GCM simulations for Climate Services (co-author Emma Suckling).
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15-18 Oct: Ana Lopez went to a workshop on Exploring the Use of Data Assimilation Methods for the Detection and Attribution of Climate Change in Buenos Aires.
10 Oct: Dave Stainforth gave a seminar in the Department of Geosciences at Edinburgh University on 10 October, entitled ‘Can today's climate model ensembles characterise a model's climate?’
8-12 Oct: Leonard Smith gave a keynote speech entitled Predictability and Understanding of Our Climate Risk: Approximations, Bugs and Insight at the 8th IEEE International Conference on eScience in Chicago.
4-5 Oct: Reason Machete gave a talk at the Theo Murphy meeting on uncertainty in weather and climate predicition at the Royal Society on ‘Weather forecasts and macroeconomic forecasts: a comparative study'. Leonard Smith also spoke at the event. His talk was entitled Probabilistic prediction without probabilities.
28-30 Sept: Henry Wynn participated in a workshop in Algebraic Statistics at The Institute of Science and Technology, Austria. The workshop was organised by Caroline Uhler and Ruriko Yoshida, who will make a short trip to CATS on 25 and 26 November.
10-12 Sept: Leonard Smith gave a talk at the Ensemble Design Workshop at NCAR. The talk was on 'Preface to rational resource allocation in operational forecasting'.
5-7 Sept: Dave Stainforth attended the Second International Conference on Climate Services in Brussels, on 5-7 September.
25-28 Aug: Emma Suckling gave a talk entitled ‘Critical aspects of nonlinear process modelling’ at the Dynamical Systems Workshop, Kalamata, Greece.
6-18 Aug: Leonard Smith gave a talk at the NCAR workshop on Uncertainty in Climate Change Research: An Integrated Approach, in Boulder, Colorado. His talk was entitled Distinguishing uncertainty, diversity and insight.
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A Svedin, M C Cuellar and A Branderburg 'Data Assimilation for stratified convection' submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
E Suckling and L A Smith ‘An evaluation of decadal probability forecasts from state-of-the-art climate models’ submitted to Journal of Climate
P Glendinning & L A Smith ‘Lacunarity and Period-doubling’ submitted to Dynamical Systems
E Suckling and L A Smith ‘What is detected by trend detection?’ submitted to Global Environmental Change
L Smith ‘Predictability and Insight: Contrasting the achievable aims of forecasting in weather-like cases and climate-like cases’ submitted to International Journal of Forecasting
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