Monitoring storms and improving weather forecasts

Predicting extreme weather events (storms, intense rainfall, heat/cold waves) is a major challenge for meteorology researchers. This is especially true in the context of climate change because some of these extremes are expected to change in frequency and intensity, generating impacts that are likely to worsen.

The weather at our latitudes is closely related to the variations of an intense air wave at 10 km altitude called the jet stream. This jet stream is strongly destabilized by storms whose cloud processes take place on a millimeter scale. How can we show the complexity of the atmospheric circulation which spreads on spatial scales ranging from millimeter to thousands kilometers?

The lecture will focus on how the information collected by research aircraft flying in the heart of storms (a major experimental challenge in itself!) can improve our knowledge of atmospheric processes, and thus improve numerical weather forecast models.