This team brings together scientists working on the components of the climate system (atmosphere, oceans, continents), and more specifically on their interactions via a range of physical, biogeochemical and chemical processes. Our research aims to understand the role of human activities on climate and the main biogeochemical cycles, and more specifically the respective roles of forcings and internal interactions in the response of the climate system. We are particularly interested in the variability of climate and biogeochemical cycles from seasonal to secular scales, in different climatic contexts (present, future, past).
The working tool is the IPSL Earth System model (LMDz-INCA-ORCHIDEE-NEMO-PISCES). Our common characteristics/objectives are (among others) :
- to analyse and quantify the interactions between the dynamics of the ocean and atmosphere and the major biogeochemical cycles: carbon, nitrogen, volatile organic compound cycles, etc.
- to represent the processes needed to better understand and analyse the model’s responses to global (e.g. greenhouse gases, insolation) and/or regional (e.g. chemistry/aerosols, land use) forcings;
- quantify the role of regional forcings (chemistry/aerosols, land use) in global and regional climate sensitivity, by identifying the different response times
- to study the effects (impacts) of different climate change scenarios on different environments using the INCA, PISCES and ORCHIDEE models;
- to develop very high-resolution simulations (either global or using regional zooms), in order to take better account of the interactions between biology (continental & marine) and climate, between heterogeneous forcings (local to regional) and climate, and between finer-scale processes (e.g. intra-canopy chemistry) and climate;
- to contribute to the construction of IPSL’s ESM model, in particular by working on a) ocean-atmosphere & climate-cycle couplings, b) energy adjustment and the identification of the respective roles of the ocean and atmosphere in the various cycles (energy, water, heat);
- work on these different themes over a variety of climatic periods (past, present, future) to enhance our understanding of the physics of climate and climate cycles;
- to systematise the evaluation of the simulated climate in order to facilitate the study of the relevance of adding new parameterisations to the model.