Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe)

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The Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences
Theme for 2008: Geophysical Turbulence Phenomena

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IMAGe Theme-of-the-Year 2008

The Theme-of-the-Year is a program to focus on specific areas of research that will benefit from intense collaborative effort. The topics will be selected by the IMAGe external advisory panel and will be coordinated by a Visiting Co-director.

The scientific leaders of NCAR recognized early on that in order to understand the dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans and the planetary boundary layer, the sun and solar-terrestrial interactions, investigating relevant turbulent processes at a fundamental level would be essential. Turbulence has remained both a vital and challenging field, taking on added importance as the geosciences tackles the multi-scale interactions that characterize the Earth-Sun system. The difficulty of solving classical problems in turbulence through direct mathematical analysis has engendered a multidisciplinary approach where mathematical and physical models, computational science, observations and experiments are combined to make advances.

This Theme-of-the-Year (TOY) for 2008 is designed to support the geophysical and mathematical communities in this effort through a series of workshops exploring turbulence from these different perspectives with the goal of increasing the interconnections among theory, computation and experiments. The final activity of this TOY is a summer school with the intent of bringing new researchers into this field and giving them a multidisciplinary perspective.

The TOY-08 will be led by Keith Julien (Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado at Boulder) and Annick Pouquet (Geophysical Turbulence Program, NCAR) with three workshops and a summer school being held in Boulder, Colorado:

  1. Turbulent Theory and Modeling 27-29 February 2008
  2. Petascale Computing: Its Impact on Geophysical Modeling and Simulation. 5-7 May 2008
  3. Observing the Turbulent Atmosphere: Sampling Strategies, Technology, and Applications. 28-30 May 2008
  4. Summer School: Geophysical Turbulence. 14 July - 1 August 2008

The workshops are planned to accommodate 20-30 people and be a blend of research presentations along with ample time for discussions and more informal interaction. The summer school will draw on the material from the preceding workshop and will feature prominent researchers in turbulence.