Originally presented 10 Jan 2015
Alexis Berg joined IRI (the International Research Institute for Climate and Society) in December 2013 as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow hosted by Alessandra Giannini. His research focuses on the role of land-atmosphere interactions in climate models’ projections of the West African Monsoon under climate change. His current work focuses on diagnosing the role of physical land-atmosphere interactions in climate variability and change, using observations and climate model simulations.
In this Earth2Class workshop, Dr. Berg will give an overview of how the land surface, far from being a passive boundary condition to the atmosphere, actively interacts with it and affects, for instance, air temperature and precipitation. He will also discuss how, as a result, man-made changes to the land surface (e.g., deforestation) can contribute to climate change.
Dr. Berg’s Background
Alexis Berg studied environmental sciences and agrometeorology at Institut National Agronomique de Paris-Grignon (France). He graduated in 2006 with an M.Sc. in “sciences of the terrestrial biosphere” and then moved to the Paris-based climate science research institute Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL). At IPSL, he worked first as a research assistant on a weather-index crop insurance project in West Africa; then as a PhD student, he used land surface modeling to study climate change impacts on crops and land-use/climate feedbacks in West Africa. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 2011, he moved to New Jersey, as a postdoc at Rutgers University with a visiting appointment at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. His research focused on diagnosing land-atmosphere coupling and associated climate variability in observations and climate models.
https://sites.google.com/site/alexisbergspage/
View the introductory slideshow “How Does Land Influence Climate?”
Curricular Activities
