As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we posed our series of questions about mathematics and climate study to Tapio Schneider, a Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech. Dr. Schneider conducts research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate changes, turbulence, and turbulent transport in the atmosphere and oceans. He is also co-editor with Adam H. Sobel of the PUP book The Global Circulation of the Atmosphere.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Tapio Schneider: I am working on theories of how large-scale (>1000 km) atmospheric turbulence influences the global climate. For example, we study how turbulent transport affects tropical circulations and how it controls the distribution of atmospheric water vapor and rainfall.

PUP: How did you become interested in this field?

TS: I am fascinated by how nature works. I was trained as a physicist and loved how physics helped explain the inanimate world around me, from refrigerators to cell phones to the blue color of the sky and the red color of sunsets. I particularly like the physics of everyday phenomena—phenomena that occur roughly at the energy of sunlight (for example, many quantum phenomena occur at the energy of sunlight, and in part because of that, quantum devices such as the transistor revolutionized our life). When I was looking for a research area for graduate studies, I was looking for a young field with open questions to which young scientists can make lasting and fundamental contributions. Atmospheric dynamics is such a field—and the phenomena certainly occur at the energy of sunlight!

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we asked Angela and George Shiflet about their current research and the impact mathematics can have on climate science. The Shiflets first met in a university calculus class, and eventually married. Today, they both are Wofford faculty members. George Shiflet is the Dr. Larry Hearn McCalla professor of biology and chair of the department. Also a department chair, Angela Shiflet is the McCalla professor of computer science and mathematics as well as coordinator of the computational science program. The Shiflets have collaborated to develop computational modules for the Keck Foundation and together they have authored Introduction to Computational Science: Modeling and Simulation for the Sciences.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Angela and George Shiflet: We are continuing to write computational science educational modules,  discussing applying mathematics and computer science to science problems.  In particular, we are writing about modeling using matrices and graph theory.

PUP: How did you become interested in this field?

AGS: With George being a biologist and Angela being a mathematician and computer scientist, interest in computational science is a natural for us!  Little did we know when we met in calculus class in college and operated on rats together in physiology that we were beginning to lay the foundation of a mutual interest in computational science education.

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we posed 7 Questions  to Richard Alley, one of the world’s leading climate researchers, and he obliged us with a very thoughtful interview on the present and future of this important area of study.  Alley, Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, studies how glaciers affect climate, sea level, and landscapes. He has won both teaching and research awards for his work, which has included five expeditions to Greenland and three to Antarctica. He is also the author of The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Richard Alley: Big Picture: will the ice sheets fall in the ocean and flood the coasts; and, what does the history of the Earth’s climate tell us about the near future.  In more detail, we have just submitted or are about to submit several papers, on which I’m coauthor with students or postdocs or colleagues, that address: i) outburst floods rushing from one lake to another beneath an Antarctic ice stream; ii) why we need to know about the deformation of till (unconsolidated sediment) beneath the ice streams, to predict what the ice sheets will do; iii) when, after Europeans reached North America and transmitted diseases to the native peoples that caused huge die-off, what the resulting change in human activity did to the atmosphere; iv) the role of meltwater wedging open crevasses in determining the rate at which ice-sheets grow and shrink during ice ages; v) new ways to use the deposits left by glaciers to learn how large and rapid the climate changes were that caused the glaciers to leave those deposits.

April 2009 is Mathematics Awareness Month, and this year’s theme focuses on the importance of mathematics in climate science.  Here, acquiring editors Ingrid Gnerlich (Physical Sciences) and Vickie Kearn (Mathematics) discuss why the theme of climate is so important this April. We plan to post a series of interviews with our authors that specialize in this area of research and hope you’ll return periodically to read those. All of our Math Awareness material will be gathered here, so please feel free to link through from your blog! So without further delay — on to Ingrid and Vickie’s post!

Why climate? Why now?

Math Awareness Month celebrates the many ways math is used by  scientists to study the climate and Ingrid Gnerlich and Vickie Kearn of PUP say that’s a good thing.

One of the biggest challenges of our time is to fully understand the complexity of the global climate system.  Climate science is an interdisciplinary field of research that encompasses atmospheric science, oceanography, geology, biology/ecology, and even space and planetary science.  Climate scientists conduct in-depth research on key components of the climate system— such as the carbon cycle, ocean and atmosphere circulation, the biosphere, and the cryosphere — with the ultimate goal of understanding how each facet works and exactly how every component influences the system as a whole.  By understanding the fundamental physics behind the essential parts of the climate system and how these parts interact, climate scientists can answer exciting questions, like how the ocean circulates heat around the planet and varies weather patterns, how the composition of the atmosphere affects global temperature, how the melting of polar ice caps can lead to feedback effects, and how the climate of our planet thousands of years ago compares to today’s – and they can make predictions about how the Earth’s climate can change if different aspects of the system are perturbed.