Announcing a special guest lecture on Thursday, October 27th from 11:00 a.m. to noon with Colm-cill P. Caulfield, Professor of Environmental and Industrial Fluid Dynamics and Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge.

This lecture will be offered both remotely and in person. Join us online using the zoom link below, or come to eScience’s WRF Data Science Studio on the 6th floor of the UW Physics and Astronomy Tower.

Use this zoom link to join

“Mixing up the climate? How the mystery of stratified turbulence is controlling all our futures”

Abstract: Richard Feynman acknowledged that ‘turbulence is the most important unsolved problem of classical physics’, and it is always important to remember that he was referring to the simplest case of a fluid of constant density. An even more challenging class of problems arise when the turbulent fluid has a variable density, as turbulent mixing can then convert injected kinetic energy into both viscous dissipation and potential energy. Of course, the earth’s oceans, a central component of the global climate system, are just such variable-density stratified fluids. The larger scale effect of such stratified turbulence remains one of the key areas of uncertainty in climate modelling. As human activity strongly perturbs atmospheric, cryospheric and oceanic boundary conditions, it is critical to understand better how stratified turbulence is born, lives and dies within the world’s oceans. Fortunately, enormous advances in data availability from both observation and numerical simulation have led to breakthroughs in our fundamental understanding of turbulence in stratified fluids. In this talk I briefly review some of these recent breakthroughs made by my collaborators, hopefully demonstrating at least some of the many benefits in using an inherently hybrid approach of physics-informed data-driven modelling to understand complex physical systems.

Bio: Colm-cille P. Caulfield is Professor of Environmental and Industrial Fluid Dynamics and Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge. He is Co-Director of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, supported by Schmidt Futures as part of both their Virtual Earth System Research Institute and their Virtual Institute for Scientific Software. He is Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Division of Fluid Dynamics,

He studied Mathematics at the University of Ulster at Coleraine, graduating in 1987. He continued onto postgraduate studies in Applied Mathematics in DAMTP at Cambridge. After completing his PhD in 1991, he spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in Atmospheric Physics jointly at the University of Toronto and Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. Before returning to Cambridge in 2005, he held faculty positions in the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego.