Related papers: How to cope with climate's complexity
Reaction systems are discrete dynamical systems inspired by bio-chemical processes, whose dynamical behaviour is expressed by set-theoretic operations on finite sets. Reaction systems thus provide a description of bio-chemical phenomena…
Understanding future changes in temperature variability and extremes is an important scientific challenge with societal impacts. Here the responses of daily near-surface temperature distributions to climate warming is explored using an…
Ice cores record crucial information about past climate. However, before ice core data can have scientific value, the chronology must be inferred by estimating the age as a function of depth. Under certain conditions, chemicals locked in…
This chapter is about Complexity and Spatial Dynamics in Urban Systems. Strong inequalities in the size of cities and the apparent difficulty of limiting their growth raise practical issues for spatial planning. At a time when new…
Projecting climate change is a generalization problem: we extrapolate the recent past using physical models across past, present, and future climates. Current climate models require representations of processes that occur at scales smaller…
For more than four decades, scientists have been trying to find an answer to one of the most fundamental questions in paleoclimatology, the `faint young Sun problem'. For the early Earth, models of stellar evolution predict a solar energy…
The gradual accumulation of damage and dysregulation during the aging of living organisms can be quantified. Even so, the aging process is complex and has multiple interacting physiological scales -- from the molecular to cellular to whole…
We consider the challenges that arise when fitting complex ecological models to 'large' data sets. In particular, we focus on random effect models which are commonly used to describe individual heterogeneity, often present in ecological…
Several complicated non-linear models exist which simulate the physical processes leading to fluctuations in global climate. Some of these more advanced models use observations to constrain various parameters involved. However, they tend to…
Climate change is the long-term shift in global weather patterns, largely caused by anthropogenic activity of greenhouse gas emissions. Global climate temperatures have unmistakably risen and naturally occurring climate variability alone…
Increasing pressures on the environment are generating an ever-increasing need to manage animal and plant populations sustainably, and to protect and rebuild endangered populations. Effective management requires reliable mathematical…
The emergence of a complex, large-scale organisation of cosmic matter into the Cosmic Web is a beautiful exemplification of how complexity can be produced by simple initial conditions and simple physical laws. In the epoch of Big Data in…
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
Predictions of biodiversity trajectories under climate change are crucial in order to act effectively in maintaining the diversity of species. In many ecological applications, future predictions are made under various global warming…
Precipitation is one of the most important meteorological variables for defining the climate dynamics, but the spatial patterns of precipitation have not been fully investigated yet. The complex network theory, which provides a robust tool…
We revisit a recent claim that the Earth's climate system is characterized by sensitive dependence to parameters; in particular, that the system exhibits an asymmetric, large-amplitude response to normally distributed feedback forcing. Such…
Complex Earth System Models are widely utilised to make conditional statements about the future climate under some assumptions about changes in future atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations; these statements are often referred to as…
When complex systems are driven to extinction by some external factor, their non-stationary dynamics can present an intermittent behaviour between relative tranquility and burst of activity whose consequences are often catastrophic. To…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…
Reliable prediction of large chaotic sytems in the short to middle time range is of interest in a number of fields, including climate, ecology, seismology, and economics. In this paper, results from chaos theory, and statistical theory are…