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CATS eNews 2012 Issue 2 (July)
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!
Firstly, we would like to congratulate CATS Visiting Professor Keith Bevan, who has been awarded the 2012 American Geophysical Union Horton Medal for outstanding contributions to hydrological research. The award will be presented to Keith at the Union Medal Ceremony in San Francisco in December. This is one of the most prestigious awards for hydrological research, with this being only the second in Europe of the 27 previous awardees since 1976. Well done Keith!
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July: Leonard Smith and Alex Jarman will be looking to produce a statistical Atlantic Hurricane forecast for the 2012 season by the end of July.
30 Jul-8 Aug: David Stainforth will be giving three invited lectures at the Dynamical Core Model Intercomparison Project (DCMIP) Summer School on Future-Generation Non-Hydrostatic Weather and Climate Models. They will be on ‘Uncertainty and Ensembles’.
6-17 Aug: Leonard Smith will be a member of a panel discussion on uncertainty at the NCAR workshop on Uncertainty in Climate Change Research: An Integrated Approach, as well as teaching at their summer school, in Boulder, Colorado.
25-28 Aug: Emma Suckling and Hailiang Du will be giving a joint presentation entitled 'Critical aspects in nonlinear process modelling' at the 4ed edition of the Greek Stochastics Meeting in Kalamata, Greece.
17-21 Sept: Roman Frigg will be giving the talk ‘Laplace’s Demon and the Adventures of his Apprentice’ (joint work with Seamus Bradley, Hailiang Du and Leonard Smith) at the conference of Scientific Explanation in Shanxi, China. Roman will also be giving the same talk at the Philosophy of Science Association 2012 Biennial Meeting in San Diego on 15-17 November.
4-5 Oct: Both Leonard Smith and Reason Machete will be giving talks at the Royal Society meeting on ‘Handling uncertainty in weather and climate prediction, with applications to health, agronomy, hydrology, energy and economics’ at Chicheley Hall. Leonard's talk is entitled 'Probabilistic Predictions without Probability'. Reason's talk will be on 'Weather Forecasts and Macroeconomic Forecasts: A comparative study'.
8-12 Oct: Leonard Smith will give a keynote talk at the IEEE International Conference on eScience in Chicago.
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.
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H Du and L A Smith ‘Parameter estimation using ignorance|’ Physical Review E (2012)
P Barrieu and B Sinclair-Desgagné (2012) 'Economic Policy When Models Disagree' CIRANO - Scientific Publication No. 2009s-03
K Bevan, W Buytaert & L A Smith (2012) 'On virtual observatories and modelled realities (or why discharge must be treated as a virtual variable)' Hydrol. Process., 26: 1905–1908
A Giovagnoli and H P Wynn (2012) '(U,V)-ordering and a duality theorem for risk aversion and (U,V)-ordering and a duality theorem for risk aversion and Lorenz-type orderings' LSE Philosophy Papers
F Birol, J Beddington, S Surminski, J Hunt, Y Timoshkina and D Critchon (2012) ‘Future risk: Climate change and energy security – global challenges and implications’ Report for the Chartered Insurance Institute
R Frigg, S Bradley, R L Machete and L A Smith (2012) 'Probabilistic Forecasting: Why Model Imperfection Is a Poison Pill' in H Andersen, D Dieks, G Wheeler, W Gonzalez, and T Uebel (eds) New Challenges to Philosophy of Science Berlin and New York: Springer
Swenja Surminski contributed to the report 'Future risk: Climate change and energy security – global challenges and implications', published by the Chartered Insurance Institute as part of their centenary celebrations. The article discusses the potential impact of extreme weather events on developing countries and the role of insurance in reducing risks and spreading awareness of climate change. The report is available here.
SUBMITTED PAPERS:
E Suckling and L A Smith 'An evaluation of decadal probability forecasts from state-of-the-art climate models' submitted to Journal of Climate
E Suckling and L A Smith 'What is detected by trend detection?' submitted to Global Environmental Change
L A 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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Each issue we will ask one researcher to contribute a short update on their recent research progress.
Dr Hailiang Du, Research Officer, CATS.
"Over the last month or so I have continued work on several pieces of research that I hope to submit for publication over the coming weeks. Firstly, some work related to the ENSEMBLES project, which involves evaluating the output of multi-model seasonal hindcasts and contrasting with the output from previous DEMETER project. I have found that probabilistic forecasts based on the ENSEMBLES stream II seasonal forecasts show skill in forecasting the Nino3.4 index up to 9 months ahead which is a significant improvement over using the DEMETER model simulations. Also Results using a proper skill score show the multi-model ensembles do not significantly outperform a single “best” model ensemble for Nino 3.4.
Secondly, I have been drafting two papers on some work I have done about data assimilation, one for perfect model scenario and the other for imperfect model scenario. Both papers show that applying the gradient descent method outperforms sequential methods, e.g. Ensemble Kalman Filter and variational methods, e.g. 4DVAR.
Finally, I have been working on the topic of sustainable odds. I have shown mathematically how to systematically beat the house when the house issues probabilistic odds."
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Thank you to everyone with their help in the move to Tower 1. The office is finally looking like home, and with our panoramic views around central London, I think everyone agrees that it was worth the hard work! Our new address is Tower 1, 11th Floor, LSE, Clements Inn, London WC2A 2AE.
The move to Tower 1 also allows us the luxury of having our own library, housing many books in related disciplines. The library is located in room 11.01G (next to the meeting room). Please feel free to browse the books and magazines, but if there is something specific you are looking for, the books have all been catalogued. Click here to view the catalogue, and log in using the username LSECATS, and password catsadmin.
Finally, congratulations to Alex Jarman, one of our research students, who cycled over 1000 miles on his very wet journey from John O'Groats to Lands End. Alex raised £635 for charity and despite the eyewatering 1008 miles cycled during two weeks, he's already back to cycling to work!
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