Julien Emile-Geay

The climate system’s natural modes of variability are known to modulate its response to external stimuli (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions), in ways that either amplify or minimize societal impacts at the local scale. My work aims to better characterize such modes over the long term, test their theoretical understanding and their representation in climate models (GCMs), with the ultimate goal of reducing uncertainties in twenty-first century model projections. It requires the construction of new tools and their application to new data syntheses. My work lies at the interface between climate modeling, data analysis, and geoinformatics. Here are some of the topics my group is working on:

1) Reconstructing climate conditions over the past 2 millennia. This we do by co-developing cutting-edge databases (PAGES2k), new statistical tools (GraphEM), or applying data-assimilation techniques to fuse models and observations

2) Understanding and representing uncertainties in climate proxy records, by modeling the processes giving rise to what we observe in corals, stalagmites, lake & sediment cores, or trees.

3) Understanding tropical climate, using an array of climate models with varying degrees of complexity. I am particularly interested in the climate sensitivity to natural (solar and volcanic) forcing and what it teaches us (or not) about climate sensitivity to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

4) Developing smart codes (GeoChronR) and databases (LinkedEarth) that allow to make optimal use of the data that my colleagues so painstakingly generate.