By simulating the future climate

The international climate community is engaged in a major exercise in digital simulations of the past and future climate. Its findings will make a major contribution to the first part of the sixth IPCC assessment report, due to be published in 2021. The French scientists involved in this work, notably at CNRS, CEA and Météo-France, were the first to hand in their copy in September 2019 and unveiled the main thrust of their results. In particular, their new models provide for a higher warming in 2100 than previous versions. They are also making progress in their description of climate on a regional scale.

Climatologists working at Météo-France and the Institut Pierre-Simon-Laplace (IPSL), drawing in particular on the research resources of the National Meteorological Research Centre (CNRM, Météo-France/CNRS), the CEA, Sorbonne University, the IRD and the "Climate, Environment, Interactions and Uncertainties" laboratory (Cerfacs/CNRS), published new data sets in March 2019, intended to feed into international scientific work and which promise to provide new insights into knowledge of past and future climate change.

Establishing an inventory shared between industrialists, research laboratories and institutions, with a view to developing and implementing methodologies adapted to the study and quantification of impacts related to climate change (CC) on aviation, is the objective of the Icca (Impact of Climate Change on Aviation) project in which the establishment participates, notably in conjunction with Cerfacs, as part of a project led by the Thematic Network of Advanced Research in Science and Technology for Aeronautics and Space (RTRA STAE). This work will make it possible to propose an action plan in this area, which is still poorly understood but which is expected to have a very significant impact on this major economic sector and potentially on flight safety.