189407 Climate Past and Climate Future

Monday, October 27, 2008: 2:55 PM

Douglas Nychka, PhD , Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
     
The study of past climate is useful to understand the natural variation in the Earth's climate system and to explore climates that are very different from the present one. Although paleoclimate is a well established field in the geosciences it provides a valuable opportunity for collaboration with statisticians. In particular recent developments in Bayesian hierarchial models are well suited for combining different kinds of indicators (proxies) of past climate as well as quantifying their uncertainties. The evidence for the human induced warming in our future is based partly on simulation by geophysical numerical models. An important test of climate models is to reproduce the long term fluctuations in the past as a means to assess validity for the future. In this way paleoclimate provides a testbed to infer future possibilities.

Learning Objectives:
Describe the importance of paleoclimate research in climate modeling. Identify key areas of collaboration between statisticians and climate change scientists, particulaly with paleoclimatologists. Discuss recent developments to quantifying uncertainty in climate change predictions.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: 1978 B.A. Mathematics and Physics, Duke University 1983 Ph.D. Statistics, University of Wisconsin - Madison 8/97 - present: National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO. Visiting Scientist (8/97-7/99), Senior Scientist and Section Head (8/99 - present), Geophysical Statistics Project, Acting Director (10/04 - present), Institute for Mathemaatics Applied to the Geosciences.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

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