Gilles Ramstein#

Present and Previous Positions at LSCE:

• Head of the “Mankind, Climate and Environment” group since January 2010
• Head of the Climate Group (2006-2010)
• Head of the climate modelling Group (1998-2005)
• Climate Research Scientist (1994-1997)
• Accelerator Physics Research Scientist at CEA (1987-1992)

Gilles Ramstein made his PhD (1987) and his HDR (Habilitation à diriger des recherches – 1992- ) in accelerator Physics. Since 1992 (18 years ago), he shifted to climate Modelling, first years as a Researcher (1992-1998), then he became the head of LSCE Climate Modelling Group (1998-2006, around 20 people), since 2006 as the head of Climate Division (80 to 100 people). In developing that approach, Gilles Ramstein was the head of the CNRS multidisciplinary program “ECLIPSE” from 1999 to 2006, has been a very important experiment (70 projects are submitted each year for a possible funding around 500Ke/year). He was also involved in the CNRS Ocean Atmosphere section from 2004-2008. On the other side: CEA, he was responsible for Climate and Environment prospective during the next ten years (2004). Since 2004, Gilles Ramstein is a Research Director at CEA.

Field of Scholarship:

• Accelerator Physics (PhD, 1987; Habilitation 1992)
• Climatology Modelling using a broad hierarchy of models for past and future climates

Expertise:

My own expertise is modelling the climate of the Earth System.

Gilles Ramstein is interested both in the Past (from Deep Time to Quaternary) and future climates with emphasis on modelling the climate – Cryosphere response to climate changes as well as the change in hydrologic cycles.

He is deeply involved in the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) for period as: Last Glacial Maximum and Last Glacial inception for modelling and comparison with data.

He is very interested by validating the models for the past before using them for the future. This is the reason why he leads the Research Training Network (RTN) NICE (Network for Ice Sheet and Climate Evolution). This is a group of 11 laboratories and 1 private company that is focused on understanding past and future behaviour of Ice Sheets and indeed of sea level rise associated to melting of Ice Sheet in the future.

All along his career, Gilles Ramstein developed this approach for many periods in the past and deep past and with a hierarchy of Earth System Models.

This approach leads to important breakthroughs:

• Understanding the causes of the monsoon origin [4]
• Producing the inception (115Ka) with an OA Model [19]
• Understanding carbon cycle drop triggering a snowball Earth [26]
• Understanding climate change in the East Africa [38]
• An alternative explanation to Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations.[64]

Other activities:

• Organisation of summer school (6)
• Steering committee of PMIP
• Scientific committee of IPSL ESM Model
• Head of RTN NICE
• Head of ANR programs
• Head of French Japanese collaborations
• Expert for French DRI

This large spectrum of interest on past and future climates implies many collaborations. The most important are:

National:

• LEGOS (Cazenave, Remy), LMTG (Godderis) in Toulouse for satellite data and for carbon cycle.
• LGGE (Ritz, Krinner) in Grenoble for cryosphere.
• EPOC (Sanchez-Goni) in Bordeaux and CEREGE (Guiot) in Marseille for Marine and continent.
• Many collaboration with IPSL.

International:

• Ayako Abe-Ouchi. Center for Climate System Research (CCSR), The University of Tokyo for climate – cryosphere
• Paul Valdes. School of Geographical Sciences; University of Bristol; University Road.
• David Pollard and Jim Kasting, University of Pennstate