Why Climate ?

People often ask me why i study climate, because it seems so unusual a career. The answer is quite common : I didn't find climate science - it found me.

As a kid going on vacation to Carcans every summer, i had plenty of time to seat on a dune and watch waves crash on the shore on the backdrop of a beautiful sky. In high school, i spent most of time trying to play guitar like Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix, but somehow was always better at science, though i worked far less on it. I was an absolute disaster in mathematics, but that changed when i was introduced to probablity theory. I majored in biology in college, which in French prep schools meant 6h of biology a week , and 6 hours of physics/chemistry, and 8 hours of mathematics (not counting weekly oral exams). Being a bit of a competitive freak, i ended up at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, orginally to study neuroscience and become a teacher. However, there were way too many bright people going into that, and somehow my grades in Earth Sciences were the only ones that were never embarassing, so i entered the Earth Sciences department. I did not really know why i had been doing all this until i sat in my first meteorology class by Frédéric Hourdin.

All of a sudden, these years of abstruse mathematics, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, optics and computer science just coalesced onto the one thing i had always wanted to understand. I got officially hooked.

In 2000, i had the opportunity to go study abroad for 6 months, and there was no doubt in my mind that i was going to New York - it did not really matter the subject, as long as i could hear some damn good jazz.

I had the amazing luck of being connected to Alexander van Geen by far less than 6 degrees, and he set up a collaboration with Mark Cane's group at Lamont for an internship in oceanography. I had never heard of Columbia University, but i sure had heard of the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note and Small's, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ben Monder, Chris Cheek, and a few others. As Humphrey Bogart would say, "That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship". In 2000, I came back to France to finish my program at the E.N.S. and had the chance to do a fantastic internship with Gurvan Madec (modeling the abyssal oceans with OPA).

Iin August 2001, I returned to New York to begin a PhD program at Columbia University, upon Mark's invitation. I worked on ENSO, which is a beautiful love story between the opcean and the atmosphere : that's climate right there. My Earth Science bent led me to look at past changes - over the past 20,000 years, roughly. I also did a lot of Aikido, which taugh me another meaning of the word enso. Five years later, a lot of time spent behind a computer screen, quite a bit in the dojo, and countless nights in jazz (and other) clubs, i am more interested in paleoclimate than ever. My current interest lies in understanding the climate of the past millennium, and what role ENSO played in it. Now the winds of chance of pushed me a little further from New York's shores...(and their jazz clubs) ; let's see where they take me next...