Abstract: 

As part of this project in partnership between LaMP-UCA and the company Weather Measures, an evaluation of the satellite restitutions for precipitation over Western Europe (especially for two cases observed in France) was done using comparative analysis with observations from weather radars and rain gauges (Causse et al., 2023) .

Abstract:

These projects aim to improve the representation of cloud processes and aerosol-cloud interactions in the mesoscale WRF model (model used by a large scientific community internationally) in order to study their impact on the dynamics and the microphysics of precipitating systems.

In this framework, a feasibility study was carried out on the coupling of the dynamics of WRF to the detailed microphysics (bin) of the DESCAM module (developed at LaMP) for the liquid phase (WRF-DESCAM project) and for the ice phase. (IANuP project) clouds.

Understanding aerosol-cloud interactions is necessary to better predict precipitation and its distribution on the ground, especially in the case of intense rain events. In addition, with this new tool, the role of aerosol particles can more particularly be studied using a multi-scale approach, through a combination of modeling and observations.

The current projects: ANR JCJC ACME et IUF IMACPI are in the continuation of these two feasibility studies.

Abstract:

Volcanos emit a wide range of different gases (SO2, CO...) and particle types (ash and aerosol particles formed from condensable vapours...) into the atmosphere. Volcanic aerosols can scatter the solar radiation back to space contributing to a global cooling effect (direct effect) or modify the climatic impacts of clouds (indirect effect) by acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or ice nucleating particles (INP). The study aims to understand the properties of the aerosol particles from volcanic passive plumes in order to quantity the impact of these particles on the formation and evolution of cloud and precipitation. To do that, a combination of airborne observations performed in the vicinity of the Etna and the Stromboli volcanos and the mesoscale WRF-Chem model is used.

The different objectives were : (1- ETNA project) develop a parameterization from the observations in order to well represent the primary and secondary sources of volcanic aerosol in a passive plume (Sahyoun et al., 2019), (2- MONUVO project) incorporate the new parameterization into the WRF-Chem mesoscale model to better assess the production rate of the newly-formed particles in a passive volcanic plume, their CCN ability and their possible role on climate and/or cloud properties (Arghavani et al., 2022).

Abstract:

The overarching objective of the MUSIC project was to provide a better understanding and modelling of intense convective precipitation events in Mediterranean in order to improve their forecast by state-of-art kilometric and sub-kilometric scale Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. 

Link: Webpage of the MUSIC project. 

My personal contribution was to study the microphysics and dynamics processes of intense convective systems using comparisons between observations performed during the HyMeX campaign and modelling at fine scale with different representations for microphysics (bin or bulk) and dynamics (Kagkara et al., 2020 & Arteaga et al., 2020).  

Abstract:

The main goal of this project is to evaluate how the multifrequencies radar observations can improve the representation of the precipitation microphysics in the model at fine scale. The methodology is based on the synergy between the multifrequencies radar observations and the high-scale modelling. 

The used observation data come from a squall line case measured at the SGP site in Oklahoma and made available to the scientific community by the ARM program.

This project focused on the processes of breakup and self-collection for raindrops. The temporal evolution of the profile of the raindrops size distributions (RSD) retrieved from the observations was compared to the modeled RSD obtained with the WRF model. One of the main conclusions of this project was on the poor representation of the studied rain microphysics processes in WRF and the possible impact of this approximate representation in the RSD on the evaporation process and on the air buoyancy (Tridon et al., 2019 & Planche et al., 2019).