Mathematics of Planet Earth

Professor Inez Fung visits South Africa to deliver the third in the international series of MPE2013 Simons Public Lectures.

Watch the video of Dr. Fung’s lecture

Abstract:

Climate models solve the equations for the conservation of momentum, mass, energy, water vapor and CO2.  We shall review the basis of climate modeling and emphasis new challenges in projecting future climate change.  A new potential application of the climate model is for climate treaty verification, wherein satellite CO2 and weather data are assimilated into the model to estimate carbon sources and sinks at the surface.  Recent weather events suggest that the weather has become chaotic.  Has it? Is this related to climate change?  Can we predict chaotic transitions of the climate system?  We shall explore insights gained from the Lorenz equations.

Biography:

Professor Inez Fung  has been studying climate change for the last 20 year. She is a principal architect of large-scale mathematical modeling approaches and numerical models to represent the geographic and temporal variations of sources and sinks of CO2, dust and other trace substances around the globe. Fung’s recent work in climate modeling predicts the co-evolution of CO2 and climate and concludes that the diminishing capacities of the land and oceans to store carbon act to accelerate global warming.

Inez Fung received her S.B. in Applied Mathematics and her Sc.D. in Meteorology from MIT. She joined the Berkeley faculty in 1998 as the first Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences and the founding director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center. She is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Since 2005, she has also been a Founding Co-Director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.

Among her numerous honors are Fellowship of the American Meteorological Society and of the American Geophysical Union, membership of the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2004 Roger Revelle Medal of the American Geophysical Union. She was named one the “Scientific American 50” in 2005 and received the World Technology Network Award for the Environment in 2006.

Fung is a subject in a biography series for middle-school readers “Women’s Adventure in Science” launched by the National Academy of Sciences. The title of her biography is “Forecast Earth”.

The MPE2013 Simons Public Lecture Series is funded by