Section: Overall Objectives

Clime in short

The international scientific context is pointing out the role that is played by models and observation systems for the evaluation and forecasting of the environmental risks.

The complexity of the environmental phenomena as well as the operational objectives of risk mitigation necessitate an intensive interweaving between physical models, data processing, simulation, visualization and database tools.

This situation is met for instance in atmospheric pollution, an environmental domain whose modeling is gaining an ever-increasing significance and impact, either at local (air quality), regional (transboundary pollution) or global scale (greenhouse effect). In this domain, modeling systems are used for operational forecasts (short or long term), detailed case studies, impact studies for industrial sites, as well as coupled modeling (e.g., pollution and health, pollution and economy). These scientific subjects strongly require linking the models with all available data either of physical origin (e.g., models outputs), coming from raw observations (satellite acquisitions and/or information measured in situ by an observation network) or obtained by processing and analysis of these observations (e.g., chemical concentrations retrieved by inversion of a radiative transfer model).

Clime has been jointly created, by INRIA and École des Ponts ParisTech, for studying these questions with researchers in data assimilation, image processing, and modeling.

Clime carries out research activities in three main areas:

• Data assimilation methods: inverse modeling, network design, ensemble methods, uncertainties estimation, uncertainties propagation.

• Image assimilation: assimilation of structures in environmental forecasting models, study of ill-posed image processing problems with data assimilation technics, definition of dynamic models from images, reduction of models.

• Development of integrated chains for data/models/outputs (system architecture, workflow, database, visualization).