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Welcome
to the CATS December
- January
e-news.
A highlight in December was an unexpected visit by a delegation
of 20 senior personnel from the China Meteorological Administration. The delegation
were very interested in learning about the work of CATS.
We also had an interesting meeting on Adaptation for Africa with members of
UKCIP and DFID and our visiting fellow Simon Mason (Columbia IRI) also
attended.
And before
the snow set in we managed to have our CATS Christmas lunch on the Southbank
followed by a trip on the London Eye!
Conferences, workshops, presentations etc...December & January
David Stainforth and Nicola
Ranger attended the AGU annual
conference in San Francisco 13-17 December. Nicola Ranger gave a
talk entitled 'Revisiting
the Generation and Interpretation of Climate Information for Adaptation
Decision Making'.
Swenja Surminski attended
the Catastrophe Forum organized by the German Committee for Disaster
Reduction in Potsdam, 18-19 January.
A number of CATS people
including Leonard Smith,
Hailiang Du, Ana Lopez,
Emma Suckling and
Alex Jarman gave talks at the first EQUIP conference entitled 'Equipping
society for climate change through improved treatments of uncertainty'
held in Leeds 19-21 January. The talks included 'Robust
measure of predictive skill and ensemble design' presented by Hailiang
Du; 'Are
pattern scaling methods useful to inform about adaptation strategies?'
and 'Is
probabilistic climate change information required to inform adaptation to
climate change?' both presented by Ana Lopez; '(When)
Are simulation models better?' presented by Emma Suckling; and 'Small-number
statistics, common sense and profit: challenges and non-challenges for
hurricane forecasting' presented by Alex Jarman.
Leonard Smith, David
Stainforth, Emma Suckling, Falk Niehoerster and Alex Jarman met with Arthur
Petersen and colleagues from IVM, PBL and KNMI to discuss uncertainties in
weather extremes, at the VU University of Amsterdam 24-25
January.
Ana Lopez was invited to
give a presentation at a Syngenta-LWEC workshop organised by NERC. It was
held in Berkshire 31 Jan-1 Feb. A follow-up meeting is arranged for March to discuss
possible joint funding options between Sygenta and CATS.
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Papers & other
outputs
Papers recently
finished:
Oreskes, N,
Stainforth, DA & Smith, LA "Adaptation
to Global Warming: Do Climate Models Tell Us What We Need to Know?"
published in Philosophy of Science, December 2010. The paper was also
mentioned in an article in
RealClimate on 7 March 2011.
Fung, Fai; Lopez, Ana;
New, Mark 'Water
Availability in +2ºC and +4ºC Worlds' in Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society A, 369, 99-116 (doi:10.1098/rsta.2010.0293). (Theme issue
'Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of
four degrees and its implications' compiled and edited by Mark G. New, Diana
M. Liverman, Richard A. Betts, Kevin L. Anderson and Chris C. West).
Published on-line on November 29:
Abstract
Full Text
Barrieu,
P; Bensusan, H; El Karoui, N; Hillairet, C; Loisel, S; Ravanelli, C; Yahia,
S 'Understanding, modelling and managing longevity risk: key issues and main
challenges' published in Scandinavian Actuarial Journal.
Abstract
Other
outputs:
A number
of articles have appeared in the press with reference to Eric
Neumayer's co-authored paper
A trend
analysis of normalized insured damage from natural disasters
(co-authored with Fabien Barthel). These include an article in
ClimateWire,
an article in the Stuttgarter Zeitung 'Warum
nehmen die Schäden zu?' published 10 December and 'Finding the fingerprints of Climate Change in Storm Damage - a
Very Long Detective Story' published in the New York Times 4
January.
Papers in
preparation include:
Recently
submitted & in revision:
Baker, D.
James & Richards, Gary "On the delivery of weather services and parallels
for the development of operational forest carbon monitoring, reporting, and
verification systems" submitted to Carbon Management. If you would
like a draft copy of the paper, please contact Lyn Grove (l.grove@lse.ac.uk)
Young, RMB,
Binter, R & Niehoerster, F "Limits of i-shadowing in a perfect model
rotating annulus" submitted to Physica D
Barrieu, PM
& Fehr, MW “Integrated EUA and CER price modeling and application for spread
option pricing” submitted to Operations Research
Barrieu, PM
& Tobelem,S “A new methodology for asset allocation under model risk”
submitted to Quantitative Finance
Barrieu, PM
& Sinclair Desgagne, B. “Economic Policy when Models Disagree” submitted to
Econometrica
Maruri-Aguilar, H.,
Senz-de-Cabezn, E. and Wynn, H. P. "the
Betti numbers of polynomial
hierarchical models for experimental designs"
submitted to Annals of Mathematics and Artificial
Intelligence
Bates, R.A., Maruri-Aguilar,
H and Wynn, H.P. "Smooth
supersaturated models" submitted to
Journal of Statistical
Planning and Inference
Smith, LA.
& Du, H.L."Parameter estimation using Ignorance" in revision for
Physics
Review Letters
Du, HL &
Smith, LA "Improvement in Full Probability Forecasting at Seasonal
Lead-times" in revision for QJRMS
Smith, LA,
Tredger, E., Stainforth, D.A. & Lopez, A. "On the Relevance of Model
Averages for Science Based Policy" in revision for GRL
Khare, S &
Smith, LA "Data assimilation: A fully nonlinear approach to ensemble
formation using Indistinguishable States" in revision for Monthly Weather
Review
Maruri-Aguilar, H and
Wynn, H. P. "D-Optimality of
Sobol Sequences for Haar Wavelet
Models" under revision for Journal
of Statistical Theory and Practice
Giovagnoli, A and
Wynn, H. P. "(U,V)-ordering
and a duality theorem for risk aversion
and Lorentz-type ordering. Under
revision for Statistical Papers
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Research progress and activities
Leonard Smith and Falk
Niehoerster started a closer collaboration with the
climateprediction.net project of Myles Allen in Oxford (www.climateprediction.net).
In this collaboration they use the distributed computing environment of the
project to test the robustness of results of Bowen&Ranger 2009 ("Mitigating
climate change through reductions in greenhouse gas emissions: The science
and economics of future paths for global annual emissions", Grantham Policy
Brief, December 2009). The goal is to estimate the extent to which the
probability distributions based on simulations with simple climate models (MAGICC)
are robust when compared to results of using more complex climate models (GCMs).
In the context of this collaboration Dan Rowland from Oxford joined CATS as
a visitor.
Max Fehr, Pauline Barrieu and Umut Cetin continue their work on a model for risk
neutral futures price dynamics in the European Unions Emissions Trading
Scheme (EU ETS). Historical price dynamics suggest that both allowance
prices for different compliance periods and CER prices for different
compliance periods are significantly related. To obtain a realistic price
dynamics we take into account the specific details of the EU ETS compliance
regulations, such as banking and the link to the Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM), and exploit arbitrage relationships between futures on EU
allowances and Certified Emission Reductions.
Falk Niehoerster, Nicola Ranger, and Leonard Smith continue
work on Hurricanes: the predictability of Hurricane frequency and intensity
is investigated on seasonal to multi-decadal timescales. Comparison and
verification of different statistical approaches are conducted in addition
to expert elicitation. The goal is to generate scenarios of future
development of Hurricane activities for adaptation decision making.
Roman Binter, Hailiang Du, Falk Niehoerster and Leonard Smith work on Seasonal to Decadal
Predictability: The predictability of important atmospheric phenomena is
investigated in seasonal to decadal (s2d) predictions produced in the
multi-model framework of the ENSEMBLES project. Impact relevant indices
like the sea surface temperature (SST) in the main development region for
hurricanes (MDR) and the Nino3.4 index (related to the El Nino phenomenon)
as well as the global mean temperature (GMT) are currently the focus of the
analysis.
Falk Niehoerster and Leonard Smith work
on SVD on ICE - Linearity questions in climate modelling:
The question of linearity in general circulation model (GCM) simulations of
global warming as a function of a increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration
is another focus. The assumption that climate response is
"linear" is widely used and multiply defined. Indeed, the
assumption of linearity is crucial for several applications of climate
science including pattern scaling. The extent to which linearity
approximations hold is evaluated in large (~2^9)) initial condition
ensembles (ICE). These simulations consider the equilibrium response of
HadSM3 to three different levels of CO2 concentration increase. By
comparing the singular value decomposition (SVD) and the leading singular
vectors of the three initial condition ensembles we evaluate not only the
relevance of the linearity assumption, but also the robustness of the
principal pattern of temperature change. See poster presented at IMSC,
"SVD
on ICE - On the linearity of climate change simulation with GCMs"
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