Michel Bourqui

Research field : Atmospheric Chemistry

Description of the research project:
Our main areas of investigation are:

The dynamics, chemistry, and climate of the stratosphere, with the ozone layer as centerpiece. The tropopause dynamics and chemistry The development of numerical models and data assimilation schemes with focus on the stratosphere. The stratosphere is an atmospheric region where dynamics and chemistry interact together:

The dynamics drives the transport of chemical constituents and thereby drives the chemistry The chemistry produces distributions of chemical constituents that affect radiation and thus dynamics The result of this interaction depends on the relative time-scales of dynamics, radiation and chemistry, which indeed vary largely throughout the stratosphere. This interaction processes are responsible for the observed distributions of stratospheric ozone and the well-known ozone hole, and more generally are key to our understanding of the stratosphere. Furthermore based on this understanding, our capability to predict stratospheric ozone over the next century has received increasing importance due to the implications of anthropogenic emissions on stratospheric ozone.

Our research is based on numerical models and tools we develop and/or apply (such that three-dimensional climate-chemistry models, high-resolution mesoscale models, highly-idealised numerical models tuned to study specific processes, trajectory models, photochemistry models,...), and on various data sets (satellites, measurement campaigns, operational analyses,...).