Chasing Clouds: How Math Simulates a Changing Climate

Global climate change and its impact on human life has become one of our era’s greatest challenges. As we are failing to limit warming to the 1.5°C set by the Paris Agreement, emergency measures are urgently needed. Assessing the effectiveness of these measures requires to overcome one key limitation in global circulation models: poor representation of clouds and cloud-aerosol interaction. High-resolution clouds models exist but are computationally prohibitive for long-term climate simulations. We will discuss challenges in numerical analysis and scientific computing for climate applications and explain why mathematical and computational innovation is essential for realiable climate predictions.