Posts Categorized: News

Summer school in Ghana and the SWIFT project This July I had the amazing experience of finally visiting the country that I have spent the past 18 months reading about and trying to understand the rainfall patterns over, namely Ghana. Despite spending my days staring at rainfall data, I only got to experience 2 days… Read more »

  We are pleased to present our MPE Wednesday Seminar Series for the Academic Year 2019/20. This series will be given by climate and weather scientists, industrial partners and mathematicians who will present an overview of their current research activity and how it’s shaping and contributing to tackle global challenges in oceans, weather and climate…. Read more »

Date and Time: Wednesday, 8 May – 11:00-12.00 Location: EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training Suite, South Kensington Campus, the ICSM Building, Level 4N, Room 402 Speaker: Professor Sofia Olhede Title: Modeling Network Populations via Graph Distances Abstract: Networks are a key tool to characterise dependence between nodes or actors. Modern observations often take the form of many… Read more »

Date and Time: Wednesday, 6 March⋅12:00 – 1:00pm Location: EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training Suite, South Kensington Campus, the ICSM Building, Level 4N, Room 402 Speaker: Prof. Kody Law Title: Inference with Multilevel Monte Carlo Abstract: This talk will concern the problem of inference when the posterior involves continuous models which require approximation before inference… Read more »

Date : 1 st – 5th July 2019 Location: 402, 4th Floor, ICSM Building, South Kensington Campus, Exhibition Rd, Knightsbridge, London, SW7 2AZ In this workshop we address the challenge of combining stochastic data-driven mathematical modelling with effective data assimilation techniques in high-dimensional operational systems. The aim of the event is to expose cutting-edge results in stochastic… Read more »

Applications are invited from PhD students to attend a one-week course on “Multiscale analysis of atmosphere-ocean flows and related numerical issues”. The course, which will be held at the Met Office in Exeter, is being run by the MPE CDT and the Met Office. The course will be attended by the MPE CDT students who are… Read more »

Date and Time: Wednesday, 13 February, 11.00-12.00 Location: EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training Suite, South Kensington Campus, the ICSM Building, Level 4N, Room 402 Speaker: Aretha Teckentrup (University of Edinburgh) Title Surrogate models in Bayesian inverse problems Abstract: We are interested in the inverse problem of estimating unknown parameters in a mathematical model from observed data. We follow… Read more »

Date and Time: Wednesday, 6 February⋅1:00 – 2:00pm Location: Slingo LT, JJT Building, Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading Title: Trends in UK Peak Flow Data: When did they start? Speaker: Adam Griffin (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) Abstract: There is currently a great deal of interest in the potential effects of climate and environmental change on… Read more »

On 6 December 2018, six MPE CDT students (Mariana Clare, Zoe Goss, Adriaan Hilbers, Imogen Dell, Niraj Agarwal and Matthew Garrod) volunteered their time to participate in the Xmaths Imperial Lates event. Imperial Lates are the College’s series of after work free public events where different research themes are brought to life by the creativity… Read more »

We are pleased to present our MPE Wednesday Seminar Series for term 2 of the Academic Year 2018/19. This series will be given by climate and weather scientists, industrial partners and mathematicians who will present an overview of their current research activity and how it’s shaping and contributing to tackle global challenges in oceans, weather… Read more »

Date: 28th November 2018 Organizers: Thomas Cass and Dan Crisan Location: All talks to be held at the EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training Suite at the South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London Abstract: This is a one-day workshop that aims to bring together researchers from two sister areas Data Assimilation and Nonlinear Filtering. The morning session will… Read more »

In July of 2018, I set off on my first ever trip to east Asia. I was to be the first of three students from Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) to engage in the first research collaboration with the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO). The opportunity had initially presented itself in… Read more »

University of Reading, NCAS Seminar Series, Friday 5th October 10am, Met GU01 TITLE Stochastically Generated Skew: Implications for Forecast Probabilities ABSTRACT The salient non-Gaussian features of observed climatological distributions are captured by so-called stochastically generated skewed (SGS) distributions that include Gaussian distributions as special cases. SGS distributions are associated with damped linear Markov processes perturbed… Read more »

Cohort 2015 students will be presenting their projects from this summer’s MetOffice placements, in addition to several Cohort 2016 students who undertook collaborations at the Hong Kong Observatory. The presentations will take place at the University of Reading on October 17th 2018, the agenda can be see here

We are pleased to present our MPE Wednesday Seminar Series for term 1 of the Academic Year 2018/19. This series will be given by climate and weather scientists, industrial partners and mathematicians who will present an overview of their current research activity and how it’s shaping and contributing to tackle global challenges in oceans, weather and climate…. Read more »

We are excited to announce that our annual residential Kick-off Camp will be taking place at the University of Reading from 10th – 20th September 2018. Kick-off Camp combines a challenging academic programme with some exciting and extremely interesting enrichment activities to create a memorable training experience. The tentative timetable for 2018 is available here.

Dr Valerio Lucarini, professor of Statistical Mechanics in the School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences, and director of the Centre for the Mathematics of Planet Earth, was announced as a winner of a Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society (LMS) on Friday. It recognises his work applying complex maths to climate science. He… Read more »

Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE) was started and continues to be consolidated as a collaboration of mathematical science organisations around the world. These organisations work together to tackle global environmental, social and economic problems using mathematics. This textbook introduces the fundamental topics of MPE to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics, physics and engineering… Read more »

On Friday 11th May, the University of Reading SIAM-IMA student chapter held their annual conference attended by over 30 staff and students with backgrounds in mathematics, statistics and meteorology. There was heavy MPE student involvement, both in the organising committee as well as participation in the conference. Keynote talks were given by Dr Mariano Beguerisse… Read more »

The Institute of Physics’ Nonlinear and held their Spring meeting on Wednesday the 30th of May this year. The event which was entitled “Graph Theory and Physics” was held at Imperial College London. The event attracted approximately 30 attendees from a wide variety of disciplines, both from Imperial College and other institutions around the country…. Read more »

The Mathematics of Planet Earth CDT welcomes you to 2018 edition of the CDT Science Festival on Science and Ethics. The CDT Science Festival is an event organised every year by MRes + PhD students of various Centres of Doctoral Training (CDTs) present at Imperial College London that involves and celebrates scientific research from diverse… Read more »

A large amount of the research carried out at Imperial College is highly interdisciplinary in nature. The field of Network science is no exception to this. “Network scientists” study the behaviour of complex interconnected systems which are often represented mathematically by graphs or complex networks. Examples of these systems include: social networks, transportation networks, such… Read more »

The EPSRC RCUK Innovation Fellowship is on  Multivariate Max-stable Processes with Application to the Forecasting of Multiple Hazards. Over the next three years this Fellowship aims to build a world leading research team in statistical modelling of the structural components that capture how extremes from multiple phenomena (hence the prefix multivariate) are likely to manifest themselves jointly across… Read more »

Congratulations to the MPE CDT student, Carlo Cafaro for  receiving the EGU 2018 Outstanding Student Poster Award for his work on “Characteristics of colliding density currents: a numerical and theoretical study“.

Awards for Excellence in Teaching are presented annually to members of academic staff judged to have been most outstanding in the quality, organisation and presentation of their teaching. Congratulations to the MPE CDT Director Prof Dan Crisan on being awarded the President’s Awards for Excellence in Research Supervision.

MATHEMATICS OF PLANET EARTH CDT/MET OFFICE ONE WEEK SUMMER COURSE Date: 25 to 29 June 2018. Applications are invited from PhD students to attend a one week course  on ‘Data-intensive weather and climate science’. The course, which will be held at the Met Office in Exeter, is being run by the MPE CDT https://mpecdt.org/ and… Read more »

The Committee on Climate Change predicts that flooding is one of three risks to cities from climate change in the UK. Flooding can result in loss of life and significant damage to property; something we have all seen with extreme events throughout the UK. Part of the Data Assimilation for the REsilient City (DARE) research… Read more »

Location Speaker  Talk title 2 May UoR Phil Jonathon (Lancaster University)  “Environmental datascience and extremes” 9 May ICL Workshop on Particle Methods and Data Assimilation “Computational methods for optimisation & optimal control of PDEs” 23 May Michele Coti Zelati (Imperial College London)  “Diffusion and mixing inincompressible flows”

This year’s Jamboree saw two full days of group work on industrial projects, an increased duration on the previous year, but with the same industrial partners: AIR worldwide and EDF Energy. The study groups gave us a great chance for cross-cohort work and mix our knowledge, backgrounds and interest. Our team-work skills played a fundamental… Read more »

On 8th-13th April more than 15 thousand scientists, researchers and students gathered in Vienna at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, including 9 students and 5 members of staff of the MPE CDT. The General Assembly consists of 22 different Divisions covering a wide range of topics from Atmospheric Sciences (AS) to Tectonics & Structural… Read more »

Date: April 23 – 26, 2018 Location: University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus, Room Lyle G74 Registration   Maps Lyle G74   Programme Research at the intersection between mathematics and the geosciences has been gaining more and more prominence over the last few years, as exemplified by the Year of Mathematics of Planet Earth held worldwide in 2013. The Planet Earth is… Read more »

Venue: Imperial College London, ICSM Building, EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training hub, Room 402, Level 4 North Date: Tuesday 8th May 2018 – Thursday 10th May 2018 Summary: The workshop aims to cover aspects of particle methods and data assimilation. This includes theory, methodology and applications. The aim to bridge gaps in understanding of the properties of popular methods and… Read more »

Congratulations to the MPE CDT student Thomas Gibson who won the prize for best student presentation at the FEniCS ’18 conference in Oxford. https://fenicsproject.org/fenics18/

The MPE CDT research excellence was again reflected by the breadth and depth of oral and poster research presentations at this year’s Jamboree. The MPE CDT was pleased to offer a number of awards and prizes during this event. MPE CDT MRes Student Award: Tsz Yan (Adrian) Leung and Laura Mansfield. The prizes were sponsored by the Department… Read more »

We are delighted to announce that the MPE CDT student, Jemima Tabeart, published her blog post on the NCEO website. The article  entitled “Can weather forecasts be improved with measurement error information?”  summarised results from Jemima’s recent paper. https://www.nceo.ac.uk/article/how-can-measurement-error-information-help-us-to-improve-weather-forecasts/

Date: 19th – 21st March Location: University of Reading Hosted by: EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in the Mathematics of Planet Earth We are pleased to announce that the Jamboree 2018 will be held on 19th – 21st March at the University of Reading. This is an annual residential Mathematics of Planet Earth CDT convention, in which MPE CDT students will have… Read more »

The MPE CDT would like to congratulate Jemima Tabeart* on the publication of her first research paper entitled: “The conditioning of least-squares problems in variational data assimilation”. In this article, Jemima and co-authors develop a new theory for bounding the condition number of the Hessian of the least-squares objective function. This theory applies to both uncorrelated… Read more »

Originally created by the UK’s Cheltenham Science Festival, FameLab is an exciting science communication competition designed to find the new faces of science – people who can inspire and excite public imagination with a vision of science in the 21st century. The idea behind FameLab is to take science out of the classroom and make… Read more »

NCEO Researchers’ Forum 5-6 February 2018 Thirty-two people from NCEO attended the 2018 Researchers’ Forum, held at College Court in Leicester. This year’s theme was improving and adapting presentation skills for different audiences. Congratulation to Jemima Tabeart who was awarded for the best poster presentation on “Correlated observation errors in variational data assimilation”.  

The 2018 Annual Meeting of the SIAM UKIE Section took place on Thursday, 11th of January 2018 at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. The meeting featured five invited speakers, covering a broad range of industrial and applied mathematics, and a poster session. The MPE CDT student Joe Wallwork and  aligned student Maha Kaouri, they each… Read more »

The Mathematics of Planet Earth – EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (MPE-CDT), together with the Smith Institute and EDF Energy, has one Industrial CASE-EPSRC studentship available to start in October 2018. The four-year PhD project, “Building physical constraints into weather-related risk estimates”, will aim at the development of robust and efficient estimation methods for very… Read more »

JANUARY Location Speaker  Talk title 17 ICL Minimising Climate Risks event https://www.rmets.org/events/minimising-climate-risks 24 ICL Dante Kalise Balza (Imperial College London) “Computational methods for optimisation & optimal control of PDEs” 31 UoR Phil Trinh (University of Bath)  “An introduction to the mathematical modelling oflithium-ion batteries” FEBRUARY 7 ICL Claudia Schillings (University of Mannheim) “Analysis of Ensemble… Read more »

On the Wednesday the 6th of December 2017 the Institute of Physics’ Nonlinear and Complex Physics Group held its annual winter meeting in the EPSRC CDT space. The theme for the day long meeting was “Artificial Intelligence and Complexity.” The event attracted over 40 people from a range of backgrounds in physics, applied mathematics and… Read more »

On 2nd – 3rd November 2017, Professor Dan Crisan and the MPE student Oana Lang visited the Weather German Service (DWD) in Offenbach, Germany, at the invitation of Professor Roland Potthast, the Head of the Data Assimilation division at DWD. The aim of the visit was twofold. Firstly, major progress has been achieved on the… Read more »

On the 26th October, the MPE CDT along with Satellite Catapult Applications and the Greater London Authority, organised this successful event to explore new ways of collaboration focused on air quality, extreme weather resilience, and flooding. This half-day event brought together representatives of Greater London Authority, UK’s Environment Agency, key academics from institutions such as Imperial… Read more »

We are delighted to have the opportunity to present a feedback on the MPE Exhibition 2017 from one of the participants of this event. Zahra D’Souza from Sydenham High School share with us her thoughts on the MPE Exhibition content and Prof Paul Williams public talk on “Mathematics, climate change, and air travel” which was held on… Read more »

From the last week of June until the 1st September I took part in the Met Office Training and Research (MOTR), as part of the Mathematics of Planet Earth CDT. Inspired by the highly popular and successful Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Summer School at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Insitution in the USA, it is a 10… Read more »

Student Discount on New Mathematics of Planet Earth Title World Scientific Publishing is pleased to announce the release of their book Mathematics of Planet Earth: A Primer which introduces the fundamental topics of MPE to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics, physics and engineering while explaining their modern usages and operational connections. MPE CDT’s… Read more »

The Fifth Annual CliMathNet Conference was held at the Henley Business School, Whiteknights Campus at the University of Reading, from 29th August to 1st September 2017. cientific themes The conference addressed emerging mathematical, computational and statistical techniques for understanding weather and climate. Areas of interest include: – Stochastic and deterministic modelling – Data/model fusion and… Read more »

The first Springer Brief in the Mathematics of Planet Earth series has been published. MPE CDT PhD student Tobias Schwedes has collaborated with Imperial academics Dr David Ham and Prof. Matthew Piggott, as well as Dr Simon Funke of the Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo to present an in-depth exposition of PDE-constrained optimisation using the… Read more »

When: Thursday, 27 July 2017 Where: Imperial Enterprise Lab, Level 2, Sherfield Building The Cross-CDT Dragon’s Den Showcase 2017 is the grand finale of the first inter-Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) Dragon’s Den competition run by Imperial Enterprise Lab. Students from four of the universities leading CDTs have been developing their entrepreneurial ideas into projects over the… Read more »

This will be an interdisciplinary conference  on applied geometric mechanics to coincide with Darryl Holm’s 70th birthday. Geometric mechanics was first developed by Arnold, Smale, Marsden and Weinstein and has found applications in areas ranging from multi-scale fluid modelling to image registration. Many of these applications were developed by D. Holm over 35 years at… Read more »

We are delighted to announce the opening of a new centre for Data Assimilation at the University of Potsdam (details at http://www.uni-potsdam.de/sfb1294.html) led by our MPECDT Chair of the Research Committee, Professor Sebastian Reich. The assimilation of time-dependent data sets into complex evolution models leads to unique mathematical and computational challenges, which provide the central… Read more »

On Friday 16th May, the University of Reading SIAM-IMA student chapter hosted their annual conference. There was strong MPE involvement in the conference: 2 current PhD students were on the organising committee, 4 students gave talks and 4 students presented posters. The conference was attended by over 40 staff and students including many students from… Read more »

The competition, was run by the Mathematics of Planet Earth CDT as part of the MPE CDT outreach programme which aims to motivate school students to engage with science and innovation, to encourage them to work together as part of a team and to engage them in a fun activity that is motivated by their… Read more »

The publication can be found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.06431.pdf

Congratulations to Goodwin Gibbins and Tasmin Symons who received Faculty of Natural Sciences Prizes for Excellence 2017 in the  Support of Teaching and Learning category. More information can be found on this website: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/naturalsciences/newssummary/news_3-5-2017-17-24-33 

The MPE CDT research excellence was again reflected by the breadth and depth of oral and poster research presentations at this year’s Jamboree. The MPE CDT was pleased to offer a number of awards and prizes during this event. MPE CDT MRes Student Award to Lea Oljaca and Riccardo Passaggeri. The prizes were sponsored by the Department of Mathematics… Read more »

To read the latest edition of our new Newsletter, please click here.

On 20th-22nd March the Mathematics of Planet Earth Centre for Doctoral Training (MPE CDT) held its third annual Jamboree event. This is a celebration of the work of the staff and students of the CDT and includes seminars from industrial and academic speakers, as well as the opportunity for students to present their research. For… Read more »

This Dragon’s Den style competition offers seed funding of £5K to the winning team that will allow them to begin the commercial development of a scientific idea/invention unrelated to their PhD projects. The competition includes bespoke training and mentorship by the Imperial College Business School and external entrepreneurship experts. The Live Final of the CDT… Read more »

On Monday 12th December the latest cohort of MPE CDT students visited the UK Met Office headquarters in Exeter.  For most of us it was our first visit there and we were certainly impressed by being introduced with the vast variety of scientific work done in the Met Office as well as the tour around… Read more »

Royal Meteorological Society hosted on Wednesday 14 December 2016 an event on “Chaos and Confidence in Weather Forecasting”. Chaos leads to uncertainty in weather forecasts which grows the further into the future we try to predict. This meeting aimed to discuss how chaos is taken into account in order to assign confidence levels (and probabilities) to weather… Read more »

The Climate change initiative for adaptation, Resilience and Mitigation (CCIARM) has recently been set up between the University of Reading, the National Institute of Space Research in São Jose dos Campos, Brazil and the Centro de Matemática in Montevideo, Uruguay. This initiative is funded by the Newton Fund and, in the first instance, will bring… Read more »

GMD publishes papers documenting advances in all aspects of the techniques and technology employed to model the Earth system. GMD has a particular focus on excellence in open, reproducible science through field-leading requirements for full publication of methods, software source code and model data. A particularly important role currently fulfilled by GMD is as the… Read more »

For some MPE CDT students last summer was a very busy time. Paulina Rowińska and Jens Bendel crossed the Atlantic Ocean to visit the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University. Because their research interests include computational statistics, the five-day workshop “Stochastic numerical algorithms, multiscale modeling and high-dimensional data analytics”… Read more »

The purpose of Mathematics of Planet Earth (SIAG/MPE) activity group is to provide a forum for mathematicians and computational scientists to study Planet Earth, its life-supporting capacity, and the impact of human activities. By opening up a new area of applications, the stimulates interesting research in the mathematical sciences. Activities of the SIAG  include the 2016… Read more »

If you are interested in applying for MPE CDT studentship please come to the MPE CDT Open Day held at University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus  on Wednesday, 30 November. This is your chance to get to meet current MPE CDT staff who will be able to advise you on available studentship opportunities and MPE CDT Programme. If you… Read more »

The 2016 Kick off Camp will be held in September 5-15 on the University of Reading, Whiteknights-Campus. The Kick off Camp, is an annual two weeks event, offering a tailor made program, designed to fit the needs of the cohort of students joining the MPE CDT. The Kick off Camp sessions feature: seminars, Maths refresher… Read more »

Climate-KIC’s The Journey is the world’s largest climate innovation summer school. It brings together students and young professionals from all over the world. The MPE CDT students: Hinesh Chotai Thomas Leahy and Tobias Schwedes took part in five-week long courses offering a unique combination of academic study and real-world business experience with the aim of creating the climate… Read more »

SIAM News Blog has just published the article that features a speech by the MPE CDT student Goodwin Gibbins, given during the Jamboree 2016.  

The MPE CDT team had a fantastic time celebrating the end of the academic year on 6th July 2016. The event started with a visit to ECMWF warmly hosted by Prof. Erland Källén. The students and staff enjoyed the unique opportunity of a tour through the ECMWF computer hall and weather room and involved vividly… Read more »

Date: Thursday, 7 July 2016 from 18:00 to 21:00 (BST) Location: Imperial College – London, SW7 2AZ Climate change is a problem – but what next? Come join in a conversation with other people who care about tackling it, exploring the questions it brings up: “what’s the fundamental problem?”, “what would a solution need to include?”… Read more »

Can numbers, algebra and trigonometry save the planet? This was the question put to experts during a panel discussion at Imperial hosted by the Grantham Institute and the Mathematics of Planet Earth CDT. CDT students Paula Rowińska and Tom Bendall report back on seven ways that mathematicians are already working towards securing our planet’s future…. Read more »

We are delighted to announce that a member of the MPE CDT staff, Professor Ted Shepherd, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Professor Shepherd, Grantham Chair in Climate Science at Reading’s Department of Meteorology, is one of 50 leading scientists who have been elected to join the Fellowship of the Royal… Read more »

The MPE CDT has been featured in the Imperial’s Department of Mathematics news section.  

Congratulations to the MPE CDT student, Tobias Schwedes, who won third prize at the Imperial’s Graduate School’s 2016 3 Minute Thesis Competition. Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) is a research communication competition developed by The University of Queensland. The exercise challenges PhD students to present a compelling oration on their thesis topic and its significance in just… Read more »

The 2016 Centre for Doctoral Training Festival of Science was held at Imperial College London on the 15th of April. “Science & ScienceFiction”was proved to be an inspiring theme for speakers both from academia and industry. The interplay between real science and its fictional counterpart was highlighted in several captivating activities including a virtual reality experience with Titans of… Read more »

We are delighted to announce the programme for  term 3,  MPE Wednesday Seminar Series. APRIL 2016 Location Speaker Title 27 April Imperial College London Dr Paul Williams (University of Reading)   Time-stepping schemes in weather and climate models   MAY 2016 4 May Imperial College London Prof Jan Zika (Imperial College London) Ocean water masses, global warming… Read more »

The MPE CDT would like to congratulate to Hinesh Chotai and Tobias Schwedes on the publication of the first two research briefs in the new Springer’s series in Mathematics of Planet Earth: Weather, Climate, Oceans.

Written by experienced researchers and educators in mathematics textbook is the first of its kind to link together the disparate fundamental topics necessary in educating and training the future leaders in this new and exciting field.

Welcome to the second issue of the MPE CDT Newsletter.  The purpose of this newsletter is to disseminate information about research and training activities, recent achievements and future events related to the MPE CDT among stakeholders and other interested parties.  

The 1st MPE CDT Stakeholder Committee meeting took place at Imperial College London on Tuesday November 10, 2015. Participants were delegates who represented the MPE CDT Partners, staff and students . The main focus of this meeting was to update the MPE CDT Partners on the Centre’s past and current activities. The goals and strategic plans for the coming year to… Read more »

Applications to our fully funded four year doctoral programme are being accepted for the next intake of students who will start in September/October 2016. Applicants are strongly advised to submit their applications as soon as possible but not later than by 17th January. An interview day will take place on Wednesday 3rd February at the University of Reading. For more… Read more »