Kompaktseminar Numerik (Sep. 2021)

On 8-10 September a group of 21 scientists met at the Pfalzakademie Lambrecht to discuss mathematical aspects of various W2W projects. Among the participants were four PIs of W2W and their PhD students and postdocs, several of which are among the ECS in W2W. The workshop was part of the annual "Kompaktseminar" series organized by the Numerical Analysis group at JGU since 1999, and it was the third one with financial support by W2W (the previous ones took place in 2016 and 2018).
The individual talks at the meeting dealt with partial differential equations governing the dynamics of the atmosphere, including the question of how to quantify the uncertainty in the outcome, if some of the parameters are only vaguely known. Within a proper stochastic setting the formulation of this problem easily becomes so high dimensional that novel and very specific means of discretization have to be developed to achieve a reasonable accuracy. Other presentations focused on proper parameterizations of cloud processes, of ice clouds in particular, and their influence on structural properties of these clouds on larger length scales. Some of the talks also focused on inverse problems and on tools like ensemble Kalman filters to reconstruct unknown parameters "on the fly" while doing a numerical simulation with parallel data assimilation.
Many of the speakers expressed their gratitude to eventually be able to present their latest work to a "real audience" in person, others (new ECS in particular) pointed out that they haven't seen some of their office neighbors "in real" before - without wearing a mask.
We were fortunate that the workshop took place during a splendid "late summer" week, although we had to challenge the various weather apps until the very last minute to be sure of avoiding a thunderstorm during the traditional hike (see photo). In the end it stayed sunny and didn't rain at all.
Making a long story short: We very much appreciate the funding of W2W, and we are also grateful to the 3G rules in Germany, both of which made it possible that this workshop could take place in person. We truly hope that similar events can be realized more often in the near future.

More information is available here.

The program of the meeting is available here.

Participants of the meeting on 10 September 2021 in the Palatinate forest. Photo: Simon Schneider