About
I am Ingénieur des Ponts, des Eaux et des Forêts and research scientist in the climate research group of Météo-France (GMGEC), in the field of atmospheric physics and global climate modeling. I am leading a small team in charge of the development of the global atmospheric model ARPEGE-Climat, which is the atmospheric component of the CNRM Earth System model. I am thus working on parameterization development and evaluation, model calibration and model evaluation. I am also largely interested by better understanding scale interactions in the tropics, i.e. the two-way interactions between small-scale processes (e.g., convection and clouds) and the large-scale circulation and its variability. In particular, I envision the development of parameterizations and their successful implementation in a climate model as a way to increase and synthesize our understanding of atmospheric processes and their role in the climate system. The climate model, which I am contributing to, thus serves as an important research tool for my scientific questions. The latest include:
- How does the organization of convection impact the properties of the tropical climate and its variability? And vice-versa, how can the large-scale environment constrain the properties of convection, including its extremes?
- To what extent are heterogeneities in the land surface and the near-surface atmosphere critical for the climate water and energy cycle?
To tackle my research objectives, I am using a wide range of data, tools and approaches:
- high-resolution simulations, from large-eddy to global kilometer-scale simulations, which resolve at least part of, if not all, the processes I am interested in. They serve both as a reference for process-level evaluation of climate model and as exploratory data to question and enhance the conceptual models at the heart of parameterizations.
- most recent observations, from field campaigns and spaceborne sensors. These are invaluable data to evaluate all the hierarchy of modelling tools (high-resolution simulations, climate model simulations under various configurations and with various couplings).
- up-to-date statistical or machine-learning-based tools, especially for accelerating the calibration of climate models.
I am currently co-leading with Martin Vancoppenolle and Nicolas Jourdain the national project IMPRESSION-ESM, which is part of the PEPR TRACCS, and which aims at improving the representation of physical processes in the two French Earth system models. My other current responsibilities include
- member of the Working Group on Numerical Experimentation (WGNE) since 2021.
- member of the scientific committee of the community software LMDZ since 2020 (president from 2020 to 2024);