SAMSI 2013 Report | Mathematics of Planet Earth

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How Inge Lehmann discovered the inner core of the Earth

Activities during 2013
1. Public lecture (part of the Simons series) – Francesca Dominici from Harvard gave a public lecture on April 24 entitled “The Public Health Impact of Air Pollution and Climate Change”. The lecture took place in the Friday Center (part of the University of North Carolina) in Chapel Hill, N.C., and attracted an audience of about 250.
2. A workshop entitled “Dynamics of seismicity, earthquake clustering and patterns in fault networks” took place at SAMSI, October 9-11, 2013. The organizers were Yehuda Ben-Zion (USC), Jörn Davidsen (U of Calgary), Robert Shcherbakov (U Western Ontario), and Ilya Zaliapin (U of Nevada Reno). About 30 attended, representing a balanced mixture between individuals coming from a seismology background and those with mathematical and statistical expertise.
3. The spring undergraduate modeling workshop at SAMSI (May 13-17) focused on hurricane forecasting, using data from a research group at North Carolina State University. Teams of undergraduate students, guided by SAMSI graduate students and postdocs, used a variety of atmospheric circulation indices to predict the number of hurricanes that would take place in different regions and of different intensities during the 2014 hurricane season. The emphasis was on using logistic regression and related statistical methods to obtain probabilistic forecasts of the number of hurricanes.
4. SAMSI Director Richard Smith attended MECC 2013 - the International Conference and Advanced School Planet Earth, Mathematics of Energy and Climate Change in Lisbon, Portugal, 21-28 March 2013. He gave an invited talk on “Influence of Climate Change on Extreme Weather Events” and also two “advanced School” lectures on “Climate Statistics.”
Future activities related to MPE

Summer program on “The International Surface Temperature Initiative”, jointly with the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences, to be held at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, July 8-16, 2014.
Full-year research program on “Mathematical and Statistical Ecology”, August 2014 to May 2015. www.samsi.info/ecology