Theme of the Year: Making Sense of Chaos
Turbulence—random, chaotic flow—is a property that characterizes movement within much of the natural world. From the microscale level—a summertime breeze across a field—to the macroscale—solar-terrestrial interactions—turbulent flows affect everything on Earth. The scientific leaders of NCAR recognized early on that understanding turbulent dynamics at a fundamental level would be essential. Each TOY workshop series includes a summer school session that accommodates the schedules of graduates, post-graduates, and other new researchers working on mathematical and geophysical questions, helping them view issues from a multidisciplinary perspective, learn from current experts, and meet future colleagues.They also realized that, because of the difficulty of solving classical problems in turbulence through direct mathematical analysis, a multidisciplinary approach would be more effective. NCAR’s Theme of the Year (TOY) does exactly this, by combining mathematical and physical models, computational science, observations, and experiments to try and make sense out of chaos.
Run by the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe) in the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), the TOY workshop series have been run over multiple weeks at NCAR for each of the past four years. The workshops typically bring in 20 to 30 people, and are a blend of research presentations, discussion, and opportunities for less formal interaction. Each TOY series includes a summer school session that accommodates the schedules of graduates, post-graduates, and other new researchers working on mathematical and geophysical questions, helping them view issues from a multidisciplinary perspective, learn from current experts, and meet future colleagues. Typically, the TOY summer school draws on material generated during the three preceding workshops and features prominent researchers in the field.
The 2008 TOY was designed to support geophysical and mathematical community members exploring turbulence from their particular perspective, as well as to increase interconnections between the two disciplines through theory, computation, and experiment. Led by Keith Julien (Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado at Boulder) and Annick Pouquet (Geophysical Turbulence Program, NCAR) the three workshops included “Turbulent Theory and Modeling,” “Petascale Computing: Its Impact on Geophysical Modeling and Simulation,” and “Observing the Turbulent Atmosphere: Sampling Strategies, Technology, and Applications.”
In the 2008 “Summer School: Geophysical Turbulence,” 30 Ph.D. students from around the world took part in the three-week session that combined lectures on practical issues in numerical modeling and data analysis with hands-on experience in end-to-end computational science, from numerical simulation to presentation of results. In week three, students were divided into small groups and tasked with exploring a problem in atmospheric turbulence modeling, relying on knowledge gained during the previous two weeks of the school. Students ran their experiments on NCAR’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer, examined the resulting data using visualization and analysis tools developed in CISL, and presented their results to summer school peers, instructors, and organizers.
The 2008 TOY, like its predecessors, not only builds cross-community collaborations in areas of vital research importance, it provides newer scientists with valuable education and networking opportunities that many will turn to again throughout their careers.
