CLImate Variability and PRedictability: from Ocean to Continental impacts: CLIPROC
General context
The ratification of the 2015 Paris Agreement engages countries and civil society in attenuation (i.e. actions to rapidly limit the emission of greenhouse gazes) but also adaptation strategies (i.e. actions to limit the impact of present and forthcoming changes). In the latter context, it is important for a broad range of stakeholders and decision makers to know how the mix of the response to anthropogenic forcing and the impact of internal variability will shape the near term evolution of climate, especially at regional scale. This goal remains very challenging and in spite of decades of study and extensive progress in climate system modeling and observations, significant obstacles in applying this knowledge to actionable predictions remain.
Objectives
To achieve reliable regional climate forecasts/projections, it is essential to reduce model biases, to better understand the physical processes at the origin of the variability, to adequately account for its internal component and assess its level of predictability as climate (mean background state, worldwide teleconnection, extremes) is changing due to human activities. The interdisciplinary endeavor to characterize, understand, attribute, simulate, and predict the slow, seasonal-to-multiannual variations of climate on global and regional scales is the backbone of the activities carried out within the CLImate Variability and PRedictability: from Ocean to Continental impacts (CLIPROC) research theme at Cerfacs.
Research areas
The CECI has a mainstay tradition to carry out theoretical and applied research on climate variations and related impacts, on a broad range of temporal and spatial scales. Research of CLIPROC focuses on different questions, including:
- Decadal variability & predictability
- Detection and attribution
- Climate change and Impacts
- Predicting sea ice variability and changes and their impact on the climate system
- Air-sea interaction and climate model biases
Research ecosystem
Work within the CLIPROC theme requires strong interactions with the Coupling, Exascale and AI/Data Science, UQ, Data assimilation strategic axes at Cerfacs, and with external partners. The Climate theme at CECI has strong interactions with the CNRM, notably through the official climate modeling group CNRM-CERFACS, that actively worked during the 2014-2019 period on the development of CNRM-CM6 and CNRM-ESM2 suite of models for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6. The Climate theme has also strong collaborations with other laboratories in Toulouse such as Mercator, LEGOS, and CNES.
