2012
At the end of the UQ workshop| CATS will be hosting a reception and book launch of Professor Arthur Petersen's Simulating Nature: A Philosophical Study of Computer-Simulation Uncertainties and Their Role in Climate Science and Policy Advice| (2nd Edition). Professor Petersen is a Munich Re Programme Visiting Professor (CCCEP-CATS). The reception will be held on 23 May 2012 (16.30 - 18.00) in the LSE Senior Dining Room and is open to all - please email Lyn Grove| if you wish to attend.
CATS is holding a 2-day workshop on 'Uncertainty Quantification, Risk and Decision|' workshop from 22nd - 23rd May 2012 at LSE. Speakers include Nick Watkins (BAS), Jochen Broecker (Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems), Jim Baker (William J. Clinton Foundation), Ron Bates (Rolls Royce), Jordan Ko (DAE programme, Isaac Newton Institute), Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné (HEC Montreal), Massimo Marinacci (Bocconi University) and Henry Wynn (LSE).
Leonard Smith is giving an invited talk entitled ‘Extreme Modelling, Extreme Theories, Extreme Statistics and the understanding of Rare, Unusual, or Extreme Events’ at the Aggregation, Inference and Rare Events in the Natural and Socio-Economic Sciences| research workshop at the University of Warwick on 17-18 May 2012.
2011
Professor Henry Wynn has been awarded the Exzellenzstipendium des Landes Oberösterreich by the Governor of Upper-Austria for a visit to the University of Linz in 2012.
Dr Nicola Ranger has been awarded a prize in the climate change category of the Lloyd's Science of Risk Prize for her Climactic Change paper on flood risk in Mumbai.
The CATS/GRI exhibit 'Confidence from Uncertainty: Interpreting Climate Predictions|' will be running as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science| on Friday 4th November at LSE.
Professor Henry Wynn has been awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus fellowship. The award is for a two year project entitled 'Advances in Algebraic Statistics'.
CATS/Munich Re Programme Visiting Professor Arthur Petersen is on the organizing committee of a workshop entitled "Error in the Sciences: Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Rectifying Measures|" to be held from 24-28 October 2011 at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, Netherlands. The aim of the workshop is to explore various practices of dealing with error to attain reliability, to gain a deeper understanding of what error in science and its treatment entails.
David Stainforth is leading the preparation of an exhibit at this year's Royal Society Summer Science exhibition|. The exhibit is entitled 'Confidence from Uncertainty: Interpreting Climate Predictions'|. The exhibit will take place at the Royal Society|, 5th-10th July 2011 and is free to attend.
Ralph Rayner is involved in organising the workshop 'Sweet Sea Observations: How Great Lakes Observations Can Work for You'|. The workshop will be held 21 June 2011 at the Edison Boat Club, Detroit, Michigan, USA
Henry Wynn has been awarded the Box Medal by the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS). The Box Medal is named after George Box and "recognises each year an extraordinary statistician who had remarkably contributed with his or her work to the development abd the application of statistical methods in European business and industry". Further details of the award can be found here: http://www.enbis.org/awards/george_box_medal/index|
2010
CATS celebrated its 10th anniversary this year and held an event on Friday 29th October to mark the occasion. An afternoon of talks covered a broad range of CATS work - for information click here|.
CATS has three new research projects which have started this year:
i) End to End Quantification of Uncertainty for Impacts Prediction (EQUIP), |is a multi-partner project funded by NERC. At LSE it is led by Dr David Stainforth and Professor Leonard Smith.
ii) 'Bluegene' is a climate research project, sponsored by Lloyd's of London and utilising the computational resources of the Hartree Centre.
iii) RAPID-RAPIT is a NERC funded collaborative project led by the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, that will attempt to quantify the likelihood of a shut down in the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) in the North Atlantic. At LSE this project is led by Dr David Stainforth.
For more information on these see CATS Research Grants|.
Leonard Smith presented a talk "Climate Models: Current Science and Common Sense|", chaired by Professor Nancy Cartwright, as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science|, LSE, 16 March 2010. Abstract|
2009
Professor Leonard Smith gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 'Uncertainty in Climate Projections' - a day of discussion at the Met Office in Exeter on 10 February 2009, supporting the RCEP study on "Adapting the UK to Climate Change".
2008
The uncertainty in climate modelling|. Professor Leonard Smith was part of an e-Roundtable organised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
2007
Confidence, uncertainty and decision-support relevance in climate predictions
Climate modelling research requires rebalancing if it is to move quickly to providing better information for tomorrow's decision makers, say researchers from LSE's Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS).
The paper, Confidence, Uncertainty and Decision-support Relevance in Climate Predictions|, was written by Dr David Stainforth, a visiting research fellow at CATS, Professor Leonard Smith, director of CATS, CATS researcher Edward Tredger and Myles Allen of Oxford University.
CATS members gave a number of presentations at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly|, April 2007. See EGU2007| for abstracts.
Chaos: A Very Short Introduction by Leonard Smith 
Oxford University Press (February 2007)
Chaos exists in systems all around us. Even the simplest system of cause and effect can be subject to chaos, denying us accurate predictions of its behaviour, and sometimes giving rise to astonishing structures of large-scale order. Our growing understanding of Chaos Theory is having fascinating applications in the real world - from technology to global warming, politics, human behaviour, and even gambling on the stock market. Leonard Smith shows that we all have an intuitive understanding of chaotic systems. He uses acessible maths and physics (replacing complex equations with simple examples like pendulums, railway lines, and tossing coins) to explain the theory, and points to numerous examples in philosphy and literature (Edgar Allen Poe, Chang-Tzu, Arthur Conan Doyle) that illuminate the problems. The beauty of fractal patterns and their relation to chaos, as well as the history of chaos, and its uses in the real world and implications for the philosophy of science are all discussed in this book. Oxford University Press information|
Professor Leonard Smith with Dr Jochen Broecker and Hailiang Du gave two presentations at the ECMWF Verification workshop|, 29th Jan - 2nd Feb 2007. The event was sponsored by WMO/WWRP/COST. See talks and presentations| for more details.
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