Speaker: Max Gunzburger, Frances Eppes Eminent Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Scientific Computing at Florida State University

Title:

The Science of Ice Sheets: the Mathematical Modeling and Computational Simulation of Ice Flows

Abstract:

The melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica would, of course, be by far the major contributor to sea level rise. Thus, to make science-based predictions about sea-level rise, it is crucial that the ice sheets covering those land masses be accurately mathematically modeled and computationally simulated. In fact, the 2007 IPCC report on the state of the climate did not include predictions about sea level rise because it was concluded there that the science of ice sheets was not developed to a sufficient degree. As a result, such predictions could not be rationally and confidently made. In recent years, there has been much activity in trying to improve the state-of-the-art of ice sheet modeling and simulation. In this lecture, we review a hierarchy of mathematical models for the flow of ice, pointing out the relative merits and demerits of each, showing how they are coupled to other climate system components, and discussing where further modeling work is needed. We then discuss algorithmic approaches for the approximate solution of ice-sheet flow models and present and compare results obtained from simulations using the different mathematical models.

Bio:

Max Gunzburger is the Frances Eppes Eminent Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Scientific Computing at Florida State University. He has received numerous awards and honors including the W. T. and Idelia Reid Prize in Mathematics from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), being a charter fellow of SIAM, and a NASA Innovator's Prize for Inventions and Contributions. He received the Rostchild Visiting Fellow award from Cambridge University and the OCCAM Visiting Fellow award from Oxford University and serves as a CSRI Senior Research Fellow at the Sandia National Laboratories.

 Max Gunzburger received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from New York University. He previously served as a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Mathematics Department at Iowa State University and as Professor of Mathematics at Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Tennessee. He holds a Distinguished Professor Appointment at Yonsei University in South Korea and previously served as a Guest Professor at Peking University. He has served on the editorial board numerous journals and book series, including three SIAM journals, and was Editor in Chief of the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis and is a Founding Editor and Senior Editor of the SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification. He has served on numerous SIAM committees and was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of SIAM. He has served as a consultant to three DOE and two NASA laboratories as well as several industrial and commercial organizations.

Max Gunzburger's research interests spans the areas of numerical analysis, scientific computing, optimization and control, computational geometry, and partial differential equations with applications in diverse areas including fluid and solid mechanics, climate, materials, subsurface flows, image processing, diffusion processes, superconductivity, acoustics, electromagnetics, etc.