Project

Important

Due dates will vary, to be discussed in class.

Project Description

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For your project, you will present a math of climate-related topic to the class on one of April 24th, May 1st, or May 11th (10:10 - 12:20, our finals period). You will have 20-25 minutes for that presentation, so the goal is not for you to just talk about a topic (though feel free to do some of that). Look for ways that your classmates can explore or interact with the topic – trying problems, going through some kind of demo, discussing graphs or questions, etc.

You will submit any materials that you use in your presentation as well as a list of sources you drew on.

You are welcome to come up with your own project topic, but below is a long list of suggestions. Links are to a potential starting point, and I’m happy to help you find more resources.

• Box model of the thermohaline (ocean) circulation

• Reanalysis and data assimilation (how we combine observations and models into something we can work with well)

• Atmospheric stability, lapse rate, and skew T-log p plots

• Models of El Nino Southern Oscillation such as the recharge-oscillator model and delayed-oscillator model (note: I can loan a book that may be more helpful on this front)

• Sea ice, fractals, and fractal dimension (note: I can loan a book that may be more helpful on this front)

• Modeling sea ice

• Fluid transport in sea ice

• Further in radiative balance: reading Manabe & Strickler paper

• Coral and agent-based models

• Atmospheric chemistry and graph theory

• Machine learning/AI approaches to weather forecasting

• Solutions to atmosphere/ocean wave equations

• Wave-mean flow interaction (how do waves affect what happens in the atmosphere?)

• Thermal wind balance (theory about how we get the jet stream)

• Earth’s orbit and paleoclimatology

• Spectral analysis (looking at frequencies of a time series)

• Time series analysis (going deeper on what we looked at in Week 10)

• Dynamical systems in two dimensions

• The logistic map (a very rich 1D discrete dynamical system that we didn’t look at)

• Numerical methods in climate or numerical weather prediction models

• Topological data analysis and weather regimes

• Different kinds of tipping

• Read a climate-ish paper that uses statistics or mathematics (this will be most climate-ish papers, but I’m happy to help you find an interesting and appropriate one)

• Analyze some climate-y data or analyze some data using methods from class (time series analysis, extreme value theory, etc.)

Rubric

An excellent project:

• Clearly and correctly articulates the key concepts of your topic

• Conveys clear connections to mathematical/statistical tools and to climate if applicable

• Uses clear and appropriate diagrams, graphs, tables, equations, etc. as needed

• Uses well-chosen and well-sequenced examples as needed

• Strongly engages your classmates with the topic

• Addresses audience questions appropriately

• Includes a list of sources you used

A Satisfactory project will substantially address all these components, but may be a bit less clear or weaker in some components. A Progressing project addresses the majority of these components to some extent. A Novice project addresses less than half of these components.