Sponsors

Mélanie Rochoux, CERFACS-CNRS, France

 

Short biography: Dr. Mélanie Rochoux is a research scientist at Cerfacs, a French research institute specializing in advanced numerical methods and simulation workflows. She leads the Climate and Environment team there. Her research focuses on micrometeorology, with a particular emphasis on wildland fires, a topic she has been working since her PhD in Engineering Sciences from Ecole Centrale Paris in 2014. Her work aims at developing new modelling approaches to better understand the physical processes underlying wildland fire dynamics by combining fire and land surface modeling, computational fluid dynamics and data science. On these topics, she closely collaborates with Météo-France and its research centre CNRM, as well as the French Space Agency, CNES. 

 

Short Summary: The Euro-Mediterranean region is increasingly exposed to severe wildfires driven by climate change and vegetation dynamics. Understanding and predicting wildfire behavior has therefore become a critical public policy challenge in Europe.

This lecture presents how coupled atmosphere-fire modeling and data assimilation can be combined to build a wildfire reanalysis capability: that is, build the capability to accurately reconstruct the behavior of a past fire event at geographical-to-meteorological scales. By integrating infrared observations from airborne (e.g. EUBURN programme) and satellite platforms, this approach has the potential to reduce uncertainties both on fire environment and fire front propagation, and thereby provide key insight into wildland fire behavior.