Meetings

Sponsored Activities

26.01.01 GPC Focus session: Rare events, tipping points, and abrupt changes in the climate system

--Organized by William Newman (GPC chair) and Tiffany Shaw (GPC member)

We are witnessing changes on a global scale without precedent in human history such as record-breaking temperatures, draughts, and wildfires. The APS has issued a consensus statement on Earth’s Changing Climate. This critical issue poses the risk of significant environmental, social, and economic disruptions around the globe. Multiple lines of evidence strongly support the finding that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have become the dominant driver of global climate warming observed since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, the deduction that human-induced alterations to many principal components of the climate system are accelerating is supported by the preponderance of observational evidence.” The evidentiary basis for these statements has been drawn from reports prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose major assessment was finalized in 2021 and incorporates a set of special reports (cited in the APS Statement). The Earth system has strong internal variability on many timescales. Large-scale transitions can occur due to tipping points in components of the climate system and, in many cases, these depend on complex interactions between different sub-systems.

We seek contributed talks in this session that connect fluctuations and responses within the climate system, spanning broad aspects of this highly impactful arena. The session will remain consistent with the primary objective of the GPC, that is to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge concerning the physics, measurement, and modeling of climate processes, within the domain of the natural sciences but outside the domains of societal impact, policy legislation, and broader social issues. The objective includes the integration of scientific knowledge and analysis methods across disciplines to address the dynamical complexities and uncertainties of climate physics.

26.01.02 GPC Focus session (co-sponsored by GSNP): Statistical and nonlinear physics of Earth and its climate

--Organized by Hussein Aluie (GPC chair-elect) and Mara Freilich (GPC member-at-large)

Observations of natural processes on Earth, including those driven by its changing climate, present challenging applied problems that have potential to advance research in statistical and nonlinear physics. These phenomena are not observed in a pristine laboratory setting, and come not only with environmental heterogeneities, but also with enormous uncertainties about the underlying physical models. This session is aimed at bringing together researchers investigating various aspects of the climate system through a lens of statistical and nonlinear physics. This encompasses a broad set of topics, such as critical phenomena, pattern formation, fluid dynamics, statistical mechanics, nonlinear feedbacks, and machine learning. We welcome both theoretical and applied research. This session will facilitate an exchange of ideas and pressing questions between physicists and Earth scientists, and explore how modern methods of statistical and nonlinear physics can have an impact on these problems, and what new physics can be learned by studying Earth's many physical processes.

GPC Organized Tutorial (Sunday, March 5, 2023): The Physics of Climate and Climate Change

Physics provides the foundation to climate science. Last year’s March meeting of the APS began with a “Nobel special session,” which celebrated the prize-winning contributions of climate scientists Syukuro Manabe and Klauss Hasselmann to our understanding of the climate system. It also summarized the consensus on anthropogenic climate change in the long-awaited Sixth Summary Assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

Earth’s climate embraces a dizzying array of physical processes, which are often hard to parse. The radiative energy received at the Earth’s surface is profoundly influenced by its reflectivity or albedo which varies dramatically due to the heterogeneous nature of the surfaces encountered (deserts and mountains, marshes and wetlands, forests and vegetation covered), ranging from different kinds of landforms to atmosphere, ocean, and ice. In general, however, radiative processes are driven by the need to balance (net) incoming solar radiation with outgoing thermal radiation, the latter emitted primarily from the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses. Radiative energy balance is achieved via three main pathways: vertical energy transport via infrared radiation, vertical energy transport via atmospheric convection (e.g., thunderstorms), and poleward energy transport via large-scale atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Moreover, relatively small-scale variability contributes to destructive phenomena including hurricanes, tornadoes, ice-sheet melting, sea-level change, and flooding. This tutorial will review the basics of these intersecting phenomena as a system, emphasizing fundamental physical principles, and will also touch on climate impacts and areas for future research relevant for physicists.

 

The tutorial is intended for graduate students, postdocs, and researchers who are interested in climate as a possible subject of research, as well as those simply interested in learning about the basic physics of climate. GPC intends to cover the registration costs for ~50 students.

 

Topics:

  • Radiation Balance
  • Large-Scale and Global Circulation
  • Small-Scale Atmospheric Dynamics
  • Future Prospects and Impacts

 

Instructors: Dr. Nadir Jeevanjee, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton Prof. Tiffany A. Shaw, University of Chicago Prof. Allison Wing, Florida State University Prof. Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania