Projects

THINICE

The THINICE field campaign in Svalbard in August 2022 was dedicated to studying Arctic cyclones and their interactions with tropopause polar vortices, clouds and the mobile marginal ice zone in summer. Two complementary instrumented research aircraft were deployed. The SAFIRE ATR42 aircraft flew in the mid-troposphere and was equipped with the remote sensing instrumentation and in-situ cloud microphysics probes (see flights in the figure). Objectives of the ATR42 flights were to observe the wind and cloud structure of Arctic cyclones and their evolution. More details here: https://ralithinice.aeris-data.fr/.. The British Antarctic Survey Twin Otter aircraft flew at low level to measure surface-layer turbulent fluxes and sea-ice properties including surface temperature, albedo and roughness. More details here: https://research.reading.ac.uk/arctic-summertime-cyclones/ Long duration instrumented balloons, operated by Windborne Systems, sampled Arctic cyclones and tropopause polar vortices.

DIP-NAWDEX

The DIP-NAWDEX (Diabatic Processes during North Atlantic Waveguide and Downstream Impact Experiment; https://www.lmd.ens.fr/DIPNAWDEX/) project aimed at better understanding the role played by small scales diabatic processes like cloud microphysics or convection in mid-latitude atmospheric disturbances and their implication in the formation of weather forecast errors and climate model biases. The project is part of the international project NAWDEX (http://nawdex.ethz.ch/) a field campaign that occurred in September-October 2016 that provided a unique observational dataset. The focus was made on warm conveyor belts that correspond to air masses gaining humidity inside the warm sector of extratropical cyclones and ascend from the boundary layer to the tropopause level where they interact with the jet stream. The figure shows reflectivity mesured by the Doppler cloud radar RASTA on board the SAFIRE Falcon 20 aircraft along the transects of the flight F6 between Iceland and Greenland on 2 October 2016 in the morning.

ROADMAP

ROADMAP (Role of ocean dynamics and Ocean-Atmosphere interactions in Driving cliMAte variations and future Projections of impact-relevant extreme events) is a European project; http://roadmap.rd.ciencias.ulisboa.pt/) aims at better understanding how the ocean shapes the climate and associated extreme events in the northern hemisphere on seasonal time scales but also over multiple decades as climate-change progresses. Our contribution in the project is to better understand tropics-extratropics interactions at planetary scales and in particular the role played by the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) on the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which determines regions affected by mid-latitude storms. Our approach is based on numerical modelling using a simplified dry general circulation model and forcing the model with artificial MJO forcings. The above figure shows tha ability of dry large-scale dynamics to reproduce the main feature of the teleconnection.

EDIPI

We are one of the partner of the EDIPI (european weather Extremes: DrIvers, Predictability and Impacts; https://edipi-itn.eu/) project. EDIPI is an international consortium of universities, research centres and private companies aiming to further our holistic understanding of temperature, precipitation (incl. drought) and surface wind extremes over Europe. The project is funded under the European Commission’s H2020-MSCA-ITN programme and is composed of 14 doctoral projects. Our contribution is to better understand processes leading to the formation, maintenance and decay of atmospheric blockings that are persistent circulations triggering extreme temperature events in summer and winter (see the example of February 2012 in the figure).