M2 Studying the Climates of the Earth

• Skills common to both sub-tracks:
  • Conceptualize, structure, and conduct an individual or team scientific project and conduct a critical analysis of the results, using appropriate scientific vocabulary in French and English to describe the problem.
  • Communicate the results of their work, in French and English, both orally and in writing.
  • Share a common understanding of the climate system.
  • Conduct scientific and technical monitoring in the fields of climate and energy by analyzing relevant documents.
• CLIMEO sub-track:
  • Analyze the elements of natural and forced variability in the Earth's climates, at different time scales (current and past climates, seasonal to decadal), by reconstructing their interconnections in a structured manner;
  • Use relevant tools (analysis, theory, experimentation) to extract information from a set of observations, identifying relevant parameters, formulating appropriate hypotheses and approximations;
  • Conduct model-data comparisons to quantify the climate mechanisms involved (feedbacks, forcing, system nonlinearities, etc.), to constrain numerical climate models while analyzing instrumented measurements (remote sensing, in situ sampling, spectroscopy) and their strengths and weaknesses.
• CLARE sub-track:
  • Develop a scientific approach to climate change, its impacts, and solutions to address it, using robust, quantitative methods and critical thinking.
  • Restore the fundamental concepts and orders of magnitude associated with climate dynamics, biogeochemical cycles, climate change and its impacts, Earth system modeling and observation, adaptation and mitigation solutions, and required resources.
  • Implement appropriate quantitative numerical methods (e.g., numerical simulations, machine learning, inversions) or experimental methods (fieldwork, analyses) to address existing and emerging scientific questions on climate change.
  • Meet societal demands related to climate change and variability based on simulations and observations, by contributing to the development of services co-constructed with users (businesses, communities, agencies, etc.); particularly around mitigation and adaptation issues, in conjunction with the humanities and social sciences.

Climate change is a major challenge for current and future generations and is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals defined by UNESCO. Understanding climate change and producing robust projections for the coming centuries is a complex task because it is multi-component, multi-scale, and multidisciplinary.

Multi-Component and Multi-Scale. Indeed, to project into the future, we must first understand the climate system, which is a complex, multi-component system with interactions: oceans, atmosphere, continental surfaces, hydrosphere, and biosphere. To this end, natural archives such as ice or marine sediments offer formidable investigative possibilities for reconstructing past climates using climate models and for improving these models, which are essential tools for projecting into the climate future. Since the industrial revolution, direct observations of the climate system have complemented natural archives to document contemporary climate changes in detail, both spatially and temporally, thanks to a growing set of in-situ and satellite experimental methods and regional to global models.

Multidisciplinary. Understanding the climate system and its evolution draws on several disciplines:

• Physics, which explains the flow of the Earth's fluid envelopes (air, water), energy exchanges, radiation-matter interactions, and the wave aspects of natural phenomena;
• Earth sciences, which provide geophysical and geochemical tools to document the interactions between the components of the climate system, the major biogeochemical cycles (carbon, nitrogen, etc.), and the water cycle, based on continental and marine climate archives (paleoclimatology, geochronometers) and contemporary observations.
• Applied mathematics, which provides numerical and statistical quantification methods (numerical simulation, machine learning, inverse problems);
• Chemistry, which allows us to understand key elements of the climate and life on Earth, such as greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, and atmospheric pollution;
• human and social sciences which provide their expertise on the socio-economic scenarios of the transformations to be carried out and on the question of adaptation.

The objective of the M2 ECLAT is to provide high-level, multidisciplinary research training focused on the climate system and the physics of climate change (IPCC group I), by providing reinforcement on analysis and simulation methods or an opening on impacts, and adaptation and mitigation solutions (IPCC groups II and III). The CLlImat: Modeling and Observations (CLIMEO) sub-track is intended for geoscience and physics engineering students interested in the climate system and its past and present natural variability, in observation and modeling issues for the analysis of past, present, and future climates. The CLimat, Adaptation, Mitigation, Resources, Energy (CLARE) sub-track is intended for physicist students and engineering students interested in climate physics and mitigation and adaptation issues related to anthropogenic climate change.

The master's degree draws on exceptional research potential, bringing together leading international laboratories in the study of climate, paleoclimates, and climate change.