Section: Overall Objectives

Context

Coastal areas are more and more threatened by the sea level rise caused by global warming, and yet 60% of the world population lives in a 100km wide coastal strip (80% within 30km in French Brittany). This is why coastlines are concerned with many issues, of various types: economical, ecological, social, political, etc. To address these crucial issues, LEMON will be an interdisciplinary team working on the design, analysis and application of deterministic and stochastic models for inland and marine littoral processes, with an emphasis on coupled and hybrid systems.

The spot of Montpellier offers large opportunities:

• additionally to IMAG and HSM, collaborations with several local academic research partners will be considered. To mention but a few examples, we are in close contact with UMR Geosciences (morphodynamics), UMR G-Eau (hydraulics and data assimilation), UMR MARBEC (lagoon environment), UMR MISTEA (pollution and remediation of water resources).

• LEMON members are involved in projects funded by the current labex NUMEV and actively participate to new initiatives concerned with sea and coast modelling, both through the recently awarded MUSE project in Montpellier and in external (national, European, international) calls.

• from the transfert & innovation viewpoint, the team members already interact with several local partners such as Cereg Ingénierie, Tour du Valat, Predict Services and Berger-Levrault.

• regional urban development and land use policies are very much concerned with the applications targeted by our team.

LEMON is a new common project-team between IMAG, Inria and HSM, whose faculty members have never been associated to former Inria groups. All fellows share a strong background in mathematical modelling, together with a taste for applications in littoral environment. As reflected in the expected contributions below, the research conducted by LEMON will be interdisciplinary, thanks to the team members expertise (deterministic and stochastic modelling, computational and experimental aspects) and to regular collaborations with scientists from other domains. We believe this is both an originality and a strength of LEMON.

The team has three main scientific objectives. The first is to develop new models and advanced mathematical methods for inland flow processes. The second is to investigate the derivation and use of coupled models for marine and coastal processes (mainly hydrodynamics, but not only). The third is to develop theoretical methods to be used in the mathematical models serving the first two objectives. As mentioned above, the targeted applications cover PDE models and related extreme events using a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity.