Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE) is a booming scientific sector that encompasses interdisciplinary research activities at the crossroad of mathematics, geosciences, data science, and theoretical physics.
Following the global scientific initiative MPE2013, MPE has also rapidly become a brand that is rapidly taking a prominent role in the international arena of training and dissemination (e.g. summer schools and workshops/conferences) as well as within learnt scientific societies. In recent years, MPE has made enormous progress – with the University of Reading (UoR) having played a major role in this – yet, new mathematical ideas and new well informed modelling and data analysis methods are needed for the many open scientific challenges.
The interaction between these disciplines has been for a long time a very stimulating one. Indeed, on the one hand, the phenomenology of the fluid and solid earth and of the Earth ecological systems has provided the basic inspiration leading to the birth of entire research areas in mathematics and theoretical physics, such as those related to chaos, fractals, catastrophe theory, stochastic dynamical systems, extreme events theory, and multi-scale processes. On the other hand, mathematical tools developed in these areas, as well as in fields such as ordinary and partial differential equations, dynamical systems, signal processing, stochastic calculus, statistical mechanics, taken together with the understanding of the underlying physical, chemical, and biological processes, have immensely increased the predictive and descriptive power of earth sciences.