EMC3 Front page
EMC3
Etude et Modélisation du Climat et du Changement Climatique
Study and Modeling of Climate and Climate Change
The activities of the group are articulated around two main goals:
- to develop and maintain the LMDZ General Circulation Model, which is the atmospheric component of the IPSL Earth System Model, and
- to increase our understanding of the physical processes and mechanisms that govern climate variability and change, from the regional scale to the global scale.
The group has a long expertise in the design and development of physical representations of small-scale processes such as convection, turbulence or clouds in large-scale models. These developments are guided by high-resolution process models, and evaluated against observations derived from field experiments or satellite missions. The group also maintains a hierarchy of model configurations (single-column, aqua-planet, radiative-convective, limited-area, coupling to a slab or full ocean, planetary atmosphere, etc) and a wide range of diagnostic capabilities (satellite simulators, nudging by meteorological analyses, transport of tracers, water isotopes) facilitating hypotheses testing, process studies, and comparisons to observations. LMDZ thus constitutes a rich and flexible research tool that may be used in a wide range of studies and applications.
In parallel, the group's research aims at better understanding climate variability and change from a physical and process-oriented perspective. Specific interests include the role that cloud processes, convective organization, aerosols and land-surface hydrology play in tropical climate variability, in regional climate patterns, and in the climate sensitivity to external perturbations of natural or anthropogenic origin. Over the years, the group has developed a strong and internationally recognized expertise in areas such as the role of clouds in climate feedbacks, the role aerosol-climate interactions on climate, and the physical mechanisms underlying the African monsoon, and climate features over Europe and the Mediterranean region.
These activities are carried out in collaboration with many individuals and centers across IPSL (Pôle de modélisation, Labex), France (through national projects such as DEPHY or Missterre), Europe (through projects such as EUCLIPSE or EMBRACE) and throughout the world. The group plays leading role in several international projects, and provides a major contribution to national and international assessments on climate change, including the IPCC.