This year, the EMC3 team welcomed 5 new PhD students.

Justine Charrel began her thesis focusing on the study of atmospheric water in Antarctica as part of the AWACA project. Antarctica, a gigantic frozen desert, has extreme climatic conditions that are as difficult to observe as they are to model. Supervised by Christophe Genthon, Jean-Baptiste Madeleine and Thomas Dubos, the aim of this thesis is to use observations – in situ and satellite – to construct metrics for evaluating the LMDZ model.

Siméon Lang began his thesis, supervised by Laurent Li and Alain Dupuy (BRGM Institute), on regional modelling of the climate and water cycle in south-west France. His aims include implementing an advanced groundwater hydrology module in the IPSL model (LMDZ+ORCHIDEE) and assessing the impact that nature-based solutions could have on the water cycle. Her work will be useful to regional stakeholders in water management.

Emma Monnier has started her thesis on the spatial organisation of stratocumulus clouds and the analysis of the processes involved in their spatio-temporal evolution, under the supervision of Florent Brient and Jean-Louis Dufresne. The aim of this thesis is to use satellite observations to understand the physical processes that control the life cycle of stratocumulus morphology. Although little is known about these processes to date, they are essential for predicting how low clouds will evolve with climate change and anticipating their response (cooling or warming effect).

Malek Segueni is working on his thesis on the organisation of deep convection into squall lines, supervised by Camille Risi and Nicolas Rochetin. Squall lines are thunderstorm arcs several hundred kilometres long that generate heavy rainfall. A better understanding of their formation mechanisms, using observations and simulation, will enable these phenomena to be represented in the LMDZ climate model and thus improve rainfall simulation, particularly in tropical regions such as the Sahel and Amazonia.

Antoine Serres is doing a thesis on the physical processes of spatial organisation of the atmospheric boundary layer to understand the formation and feedback of low clouds, supervised by Florent Brient, Fabio d’Andrea and Benjamin Filder. Low clouds, with their high albedo and large spatial coverage, contribute to strong cooling of the Earth, but their response to climate change remains uncertain. The aim of this thesis is to establish a theoretical framework for the organisation of shallow convection, based in particular on high-resolution simulations (LES) using the Meso-NH model.