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Scientific context

Climatologists have already demonstrated that changes in land-cover and/or uses (e.g. deforestation, irrigation, urbanisation) influences the thermal and hydrologic state of the atmosphere, its chemical composition (i.e. pollution), as well as the intensity of extremes (e.g. heatwave amplification). However, a) those impacts have never been thoroughly quantified at a scale relevant for decision making, b) there is a lack of available metrics to be delivered to land planners, to anticipate potential negative impacts of their decisions on local climate/air quality.

We therefore propose here to focus on simulating the impacts of changes in land-cover and uses induced by decisions on land planning on a) regional climate change over France, b) and atmosphere composition. Our objective is to develop a set of diagnostics to quantify those impacts (looking at both mean & extreme climatic conditions). We will look at the evolution of those impacts at temporal scales ranging from days to many decades. Simulations will be carried out using a coupled land-atmosphere‐ chemistry climate model. No specific development will be needed during the course of this post‐doc. The post-doc recruited will have to precisely quantify the impact land planning scenarios have on both the local /regional climate and on the atmospheric composition / pollution at the same spatial scales.   

Assignments

The post-doc will work in close collaboration with scientists from INRA (National Agronomic Institute) and will have three main tasks:

• Choose some specific simplified scenarios of major changes in land-uses that France may experience within the next decade/s (e.g. transition towards agro-ecology, increase in bioenergy production, changes in the partitioning between crop productivity & farming).
• Run a regional climate-chemistry model at the scale of France, to simulate the sensitivity of climate & atmospheric chemistry to those changes in land cover and uses.
• Analyze those runs and more specifically develop useful diagnostics of impacts to be used for upcoming discussions with land planners.

See file below for more information