This book, featuring a truly interdisciplinary approach, provides an
overview of cutting-edge mathematical theories and techniques that
promise to play a central role in climate science. It brings together
some of the most interesting overview lectures given by the invited
speakers at an important workshop held in Rome in 2013 as a part of
MPE2013 ("Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013"). The aim of the workshop
was to foster the interaction between climate scientists and
mathematicians active in various fields linked to climate sciences, such
as dynamical systems, partial differential equations, control theory,
stochastic systems, and numerical analysis. Mathematics and statistics
already play a central role in this area. Likewise, computer science
must have a say in the efforts to simulate the Earth's environment on
the unprecedented scale of petabytes. In the context of such complexity,
new mathematical tools are needed to organize and simplify the approach.
The growing importance of data assimilation techniques for climate
modeling is amply illustrated in this volume, which also identifies
important future challenges.