Section: Overall Objectives

Context

Coastal areas are increasingly threatened by global warming-induced sea level rise. At the same time, 60% of the world population lives in a 100 km wide coastal strip (80% within 30 km from the shore in French Brittany). This is why coastlines are concerned with many issues of various types: economical, ecological, social, political, etc. Coastal areas are natural interfaces between various media (e.g. wind/sea/sand/land). The physical processes acting on these media have very different time scales, hence the need to build complex systems coupling nonlinear partial differential equations and random processes to describe them. To address these crucial issues, LEMON is 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 (Institut Montpelliérain Alexander Grothendieck - UMR5149) and HSM (HydroSciences Montpellier - UMR 5569), we collaborate with several local academic research partners. To mention but a few examples, we are in close contact in Montpellier with UMR MISTEA (pollution and remediation of water resources), UMR Geosciences (morphodynamics), UMR G-Eau (hydraulics and data assimilation), UMR MARBEC (lagoon environment), UMR LISAH (hydrology in agricultural areas).

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

• From the transfer & 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 natural application fields for the developments undertaken in LEMON.

The general scope of the LEMON project-team is to develop mathematical and computational methods for the modelling of coastal processes. The mathematical tools used are deterministic (PDEs, ODEs) and/or probabilistic (extreme value theory). Applications range from regional oceanography to coastal management, including risk assessment for natural hazards on the coastline (submersion and urban floods, tsunamis, pollution).

LEMON is a common research team between IMAG, Inria and HSM, whose faculty members have never been associated to Inria groups in the past. All fellows share a strong background in mathematical modelling, together with a taste for applications to the littoral environment. As reflected in the expected contributions below, the research conducted by LEMON is interdisciplinary (HSM is a research unit (UMR) affiliated to the National Institute for Sciences of the Universe (INSU) of CNRS, while the IMAG UMR is affiliated to the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Interactions (INSMI).), 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.