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.

Prof. Annalisa Quaini (University of Houston) will show why high-resolution cloud models remain too computationally demanding for long-term climate simulations, and why mathematical and computational innovation is essential for reliable climate predictions.