[Stoch] Welcome!

[Tim Palmer]

  Dear Colleagues

Welcome to this new informal network whose aim is to bring together 
people interested in promoting and developing stochastic-dynamic methods 
for improving our weather and climate prediction models. We live in 
rather important and rapidly changing times where reliable predictions 
of future weather and climate, on a range of timescales from days to 
centuries, will be at a premium for a variety of purposes.

Our motivation for developing stochastic-dynamic representations of near 
and subgrid processes in our comprehensive models of weather and climate 
are manifold. It is possible that many of the long-standing climate 
model biases might be alleviated with more stochastic parametrisations. 
Also, stochastic techniques are likely to provide the means to estimate 
model uncertainty in our ensemble predictions, in ways more rigorous 
than are possible using the more ad hoc multi-model ensemble technique. 
In addition, stochastic climate models may allow one to utilise the 
efficiency of a new generation of probabilistic computer chips. 
Moreover,  the development of stochastic ideas in climate models opens 
up new possibilities for collaboration, both between different climate 
and weather institutes,  and also between the mathematical and 
conventional climate modelling communities. And finally, don't forget it 
was Lorenz who said " I believe the ultimate climate models will be 
stochastic, ie random numbers will appear somewhere in the time 
derivatives"!

These ideas are discussed in TNP's Bjerknes Lecture at the Fall AGU 
meeting.

http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm10/lectures/lecture_videos/A42A.shtml

Please post messages about your own work, and about forthcoming 
meetings, onto this network. In this regard, you may be interested in an 
ECMWF/WWRP/WCRP workshop on "Representing Model Error in Weather and 
Climate Models" on 20-24 June 2011 at ECMWF. There will be a limited 
number of spaces available if you wish to participate. Please register 
your interest to attend at

http://www.ecmwf.int/newsevents/meetings/workshops/2011/Model_uncertainty/

Other forthcoming workshops that might interest you:

Von Neumann Symposium on Multimodel and Multialgorithm Coupling for 
Multiscale Problems

http://www.ams.org/meetings/amsconf/symposia/symposia-2011

Nordita program on predictability and data assimilation:

http://cms.nordita.org/index.php?q=visits&y=6963616c5f646179313d31333033313338383030&btn_action= 


Best wishes

Tim Palmer (Oxford and ECMWF) and Judith Berner (NCAR)
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