Yohan Ruprich Robert

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Biography

“Will it be raining less in ten years? If so, by how much?” Those are the kind of questions I aim to answer with increased accuracy in my research. Knowing precisely how the climate of the next decades is going to evolve would provide valuable information for the energy/industry sectors and decision-makers. However, to supply reliable information, several scientific and technical barriers are to be overcome. My research aims to better understand those limitations to consequently open those barriers.

I am an expert in climate variability and predictability. I started investigating these subjects in 2010 during my PhD project at Cerfacs (Toulouse, France). I further developed these investigations during my postdoctoral research at worldwide leading institutions in climate sciences, including Princeton University / GFDL (USA) and Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC, Spain). I am recognized in the climate community for my pioneering studies assessing the effects of the North Atlantic ocean variability on regional climate conditions. Those include the link between a North Atlantic warming and drier conditions over the Mediterranean region, Mexico and southwestern United States; cooling in the tropical Pacific; Arctic sea-ice loss; and rainier conditions over the Brazilian Nordeste, the Sahel and South-East Asia.

Thanks to the decisive support of a European Marie-Curie individual fellowship followed by a LaCaixa junior leader fellowship, I have been developing since 2018 a new research line at BSC on the North Atlantic decadal variability and its worldwide climate impacts. Its main objective is to improve our ability to predict the global climate of the next decades through the climate impacts of the North Atlantic. To expand my research horizons, I also successfully applied to the Spanish MICINN-funded research programme, and I am currently co-PI of the project OPERA that aims at better understanding the climate carbon cycle.