Doblas Reyes, Francisco Javier
Director of the Earth Sciences Department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS).
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
Short biography
I started working on climate variability at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) in 1992, where I did my PhD. I then worked as a postdoc in Météofrance (Toulouse, France), at the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aerospacial (Torrejón, Spain) and for ten years at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (Reading, UK). I led the Climate Forecast Unit at the Institut Català de Ciències del Clima (IC3) from 2010 to 2015. I am currently the head of the Department of Earth Sciences of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). The Department hosts more than 100 engineers, physicists, mathematicians and social scientists who bring the latest developments in supercomputing and data analysis to provide the best information and services on climate and air quality. I am author of more than 200 peer-reviewed papers (h index 61, Google Scholar), member of several international scientific committees and supervisor of around 20 postdocs, engineers and PhD students.
Research interests
Global climate is highly variable, which implies that there is much more to understand than just climate change. Climate prediction aims at predicting the variations of climate at different time scales, ranging from one month to several years beyond the start of the forecast. I use an Earth system model based on differential equations to explore the limits of the forecast quality over different parts of the globe, in particular over Africa, South America, the Arctic and Southern Europe. I develop this model to explore the advantages of increasing its resolution to better reproduce the physical processes at the origin of climate variability. I also use statistical techniques to adapt the resulting climate information to specific user needs. Improving the application of this climate information to different socio-economic sectors, with a special focus on energy and disaster risk management, is one of my main targets to try to make a change in both society and the economy.