April 5, 2018
Mathematics Colloquium Lecture April 5
Kenneth Golden, University of Utah, will present "Linking Scales in Earth's Sea Ice System" as part of the Mathematics Department Colloquium Lecture series at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, April 5, in 102 Cardwell Hall.
The abstract for the lecture is: Polar sea ice is a critical component of the Earth's climate system. It exhibits complex composite structure on length scales ranging from microns to hundreds of kilometers. Golden will give an overview of how they are using theories of composite materials and statistical physics to link behavior on various scales in the sea ice system. In particular, they address fundamental questions in sea ice homogenization, where information on smaller scales is incorporated into rigorous representations of effective behavior on larger scales, and parameters controlling small scale processes are reconstructed from larger scale observations. Examples include fluid flow through the porous brine microstructure, wave propagation in the marginal ice zone, convection enhanced thermal conduction, remote sensing, and the evolution of melt ponds on Arctic sea ice. This work is helping to advance how sea ice is represented in climate models, and to improve projections of climate change and the response of polar ecosystems.