Mathematics and Climate

Catalog description

We study important conceptual models of Earth’s climate system and the mathematical, statistical and computational techniques for analyzing these models. Topics from climate science include the Earth’s energy balance, ocean circulation patterns, atmospheric models, carbon dioxide data and trends, ice caps and glaciation periods. Mathematical, statistical and computational techniques include conservation laws, dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, regression analysis, Fourier transforms, computational solutions of boundary value problems, and statistics of extreme events. About half of the coursework involves computational coding to implement the methods and illustrate theoretical results.