Quantitative Climate Science Seminar | Marek Stastna, Quantitative Climate Science: Adding Substance to a Phrase

Climate science has undergone rapid and transformative development in recent decades. Much of this progress has been driven by advances in computation, accompanied by an expanding range of applications and increasingly sophisticated ways of communicating climate concepts. Despite the deep historical ties between climate science and applied mathematics, those connections have frayed over the very period in which the field has grown most dramatically.

This disconnect is reflected in several ways: in the shifting content of graduate curricula, in the hiring challenges faced by our partners in the civil service, and in the current ambiguity surrounding the role of AI within the broader climate enterprise.

In this talk, I will present three examples of mathematical concepts that surface across different subfields of climate science. These will serve as entry points to explore both the opportunities and the obstacles — conceptual, notational, and practical — that arise when trying to bridge the gap between mathematical and climate science communities. I will make the case for a broader understanding of what constitutes "climate-related" research and argue for a thoughtful reassessment of the training we offer today's students, especially in light of what previous generations (my own included) were taught.