final_program_abstracts[1]

Dear Participants,
Welcome to the 11 th International Meeting on Statistical climatology, which is the
11 th meeting since the first IMSC meeting in 1979 in Tokyo, Japan. Since then,
meetings have been held at intervals of about 3-4 years in many locations
worldwide, with the goal of ‘promotion of good statistical practice in the atmospheric
and climate sciences and in maintaining and enhancing the lines of communication
between the atmospheric and statistical science communities.’ This goal has been
served very well by interdisciplinary IMSC meetings over the years, and the
importance of this goal, if anything, has increased since. We have all witnessed the
call for stronger interaction between statistics and climate science, and not all calls
seem to have been aware of this long tradition of collaboration and crossfertilization.
Climate science needs statistics, since climate is per se a statistical
description of weather variability and means. Close interaction with statistics helps
using the most appropriate tools, and particularly helps to use modern tools to
describe uncertainty fully, rigorously and elegantly. On the other hand, statistics
benefits from exposure to interesting questions coming from climate science. At this
meeting, you will hear, for example, about questions of reconstructing past climate,
and the statistical tools suitable to describe noisy proxy-climate relationships; about
methods to reconstruct patterns of climate variations in instrumental times, methods
to homogenize and quality control climate data; to use multi-model data fully and
rigorously for predictions; to design experiments, methods to evaluate predictions;
describe changes in extremes; low-frequency climate variability; and methods to
base predictions on observed changes.
I wish to thank the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) for
their support of the session on reconstructing Holocene climate, and particularly
Audrey Brown and Irene Moore for their help with logistics and their extremely useful
advice. I also thank the National Center of Atmospheric Science (NCAS), and the
Center for Earth System Dynamics, which is part of the Scottish Alliance for
GeoSciences, the Environment and Society, SAGES, for support in many important
ways (not least underwriting). The meeting could not have happened without the
organizational skills of my graduate student, Simone Morak, and without Stephanie
West at SAGES, Edinburgh, and co-op student Rodney Chen at Environment
Canada, Toronto. Thanks also to the session organizers, who helped make this a
really exciting program, and apologies to everybody for the errors in program drafts–
many found, but I am sure there are remaining ones.
Last not least, I hope you have an opportunity to see a bit of beautiful Edinburgh,
and have a chance to go out to the Highlands and the west coast. Having moved
myself here only recently, I am amazed by Scotland’s beauty, and its long scientific
tradition. Failte gu Alba, tha mi 'n dochas gum bidh spors againn. (Phonetically -
Falche goo Alba, ha me n dochas goom be spors ackainn); which I am told (by my
kids’school, thanks!) means welcome to Scotland, I wish you a good time!
Gabi Hegerl, Edinburgh, June 29, 2010