Zoom on Keynote 2021 - AST Icos-france

* Valérie Masson-Delmotte

Valérie Masson-Delmotte is a Co-Chair of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the Sixth Assessment cycle, and a Senior Scientist in France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environment Sciences (LSCE) of Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, at the University of Paris Saclay.

Masson-Delmotte, trained in fluid physics, has an extensive research background on issues such as quantifying and understanding past climate and water cycle variability, climate information from ice cores, climate response to natural and anthropogenic forcings, climate feedbacks, abrupt climate change, ice sheets and sea level. With 250 peer-review publications, she is one of the most highly cited scientists in the field of geosciences since 2014. She is extremely active in outreach and science communication and has contributed to several books on climate change for children and the general public.

Her contributions to science advances have been acknowledged by several prestigious prizes, such as the European Commission Descartes Prize in 2008 for the EPICA project, the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize as Women scientist of year 2013, the Martha T. Muse for Antarctic science in 2015, Nature's 10 in 2018, the CNRS silver medal in 2019, the European Geophysical Union Milankovicz medal in 2020, and the medal of the President of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research in 2020.


* Frédéric Chevallier

Frédéric Chevallier obtained his Master degree in Physics at the University of Rennes (France) in 1993. His PhD work on radiation modelling in the atmosphere took place at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD, France). He joined the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF, UK), an excellence centre in data assimilation, in 1998 to work in the Physical Aspects and Satellite sections. His involvement in data assimilation increased over the years, in particular to initiate the assimilation of cloud-affected and rain-affected satellite radiances at ECMWF.

Appointed permanent research scientist at LSCE in December 2003, he has developed a variational system for the atmospheric inversion of surface fluxes of atmospheric compounds from in situ measurements and satellite retrievals, that has played a pioneer role for the scientific exploitation of several satellite missions dedicated to the observation of the atmospheric composition. Frédéric Chevallier is internationally recognized as one of the leading experts in the domain. He has been coordinating the inversion activities of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service both in its pre-operational (since 2009) and operational (since 2015) phases. He has been leading the Climate Research Group within ESA's GreenHouse Gases - Climate Change Initiative and has animated many related working groups.

He is a member of the science teams of the MicroCarb (French and UK space agencies), MERLIN (French and German space agencies) and OCO-2 (USA) satellite missions, that are dedicated to observing carbon dioxide and methane from space. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and of 1 patent about parallel computing. Between 2017 and 2019, he was the main scientific advisor for all activities of CEA related to the impacts of technologies on human beings and environment, CEA being one of the main national research institutes in France.


* Mark Sutton

Professor Mark Sutton is an environmental physicist based at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), in Edinburgh. An expert on atmospheric ammonia, he leads international research activities on nitrogen at the science–policy interface.

He is a former chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative (INI) and currently directs the UNEP/GEF International Nitrogen Management System (INMS) and the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund’s South Asian Nitrogen Hub. Professor Sutton is also a co-chair of the UNECE Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen (TFRN) and vice chair of the Global Partnership on Nutrient Management (GPMN).  

* Richard Sanders

Richard Sanders has been Director of the ICOS Ocean Thematic Centre, headquartered at the Norwegian Research Centre in Bergen Norway, since 2019. Prior to this he was employed at the UK National Oceanography Centre in Southampton from 2000, latterly as the chair of the ocean biogeochemistry and ecosystems group. His major research focus from 2000-2015 was the biological carbon pump, the way in which carbon is stored in the ocean interior by biological processes. Since 2015 his research interests have expanded to also include shelf sea and estuarine processes and the open ocean sink for anthropogenic CO2.

The Oceans role in the global C cycle: Future priorities for research:
The ocean plays a pivotal role in the global carbon cycle, taking up and storing approximately 25% of the carbon we release to the atmosphere, thus slowing the rate of climate change and buying us more time to implement mitigation and adaptation measures. However this flux, large as it is, is much smaller than the natural fluxes of CO2 into and out of the ocean meaning that future research challenges need to address the ocean c cycle as a whole. In this talk I will cover the major processes involved in regulating ocean c uptake and describe some of the major controls over these before suggesting a few areas where our knowledge is poor and hence which constitute urgen priorities for future investment.