Event

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a Virtual EES Seminar Series

Friday, December 8th - 3:00 PM

Held via Zoom - Please email earth@sas.upenn.edu for login information

“The Statistical Mechanics of Arctic Sea Ice”

Arctic sea ice is a key component of Earth’s climate system, primarily due to the role it plays in the radiation budget through its large albedo relative to the ocean upon which it sits.  Any climatological study of Arctic sea ice necessarily involves the evolution of the sea-ice volume and its interactions with the other components of the climate system. Although routine measurement of the areal extent of sea ice using satellites is now possible, a routine measurement of its thickness still remains challenging. This motivates the development of an observationally consistent mathematical theory to study the evolution of the thickness field.  Treating the mechanical and thermodynamic interactions that control the ice thickness in a manner akin to the collisions of water molecules with a Brownian particle, a Fokker-Planck-like equation for the ice thickness distribution is derived that quantitatively captures the large scale observations.  Solving a single forced partial differential equation differs substantially from the approach used in climate models and yet is far superior in its predictive power.

Dr. John Wettlaufer

A.M. Bateman Professor

Department of Physics

Yale University

Dr. Wettlaufer completed his PhD in statistical physics at the University of Washington in 1991, and stayed on the faculty until 2002, when he moved to Yale University.  Since then he has been a professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and is now on the faculty at both Yale and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm.