Datlas Ocean

Datlas Christmas Dinner

2024-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

On Monday, December 16th, the Datlas team came together for a festive Christmas dinner at the restaurant La belle idée, located in downtown Grenoble. This special occasion coincided with the visit of Christine, our administrative and legal manager, who joined us for a day of productive and engaging meetings.

Organized by Clément Ubelmann, the dinner brought together all Datlas members, including our recent arrivals, as well as colleagues from the MEOM team at IGE. The event provided a wonderful opportunity for informal discussions in a relaxed and cheerful atmosphere, strengthening human bonds among collegues.

A big thank you to Clément for organizing this delightful gathering and to everyone who attended for making it such a memorable and enjoyable occasion. This dinner was a perfect way to end the year with a spirit of teamwork and camaraderie.

3 new recruits at Datlas !

2024-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

We are delighted to welcome three new team members, each bringing their expertise to the forefront of geoscientific research in Datlas.

Lohenn Fiol joins us as an engineer dedicated to the CMEMS Service Evolution project ARTIC-BLISS. Laurine’s work will focus on enhancing sea ice forecasting through atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) coupling. Her contributions will push the boundaries of predictive modeling, enabling more accurate and reliable insights into Arctic conditions—a critical endeavor as we navigate a warming climate.

Florian Le Guillou, our new fellow research scientist, will spearhead research on ocean surface data processing and sensor synergy. Florian’s expertise promises to bridge gaps between diverse data sources, ensuring that we extract maximum value from advanced observation technologies. His work will play a pivotal role in improving ocean surface dynamic reconstructions.

Antoine Blondel comes aboard as an engineer to contribute to the CNES Odysea project. Antoine will focus on refining the calibration of the upcoming surface current Odysea satellite mission. This project is crucial for advancing the precision of ocean current observations, which are foundational to monitoring climate change and enhancing maritime operations.

We’re thrilled to have Laurine, Florian, and Antoine join the Datlas team. Their expertise will strengthen our projects and help drive progress in geoscientific research and services.

Welcome aboard, Lohenn, Florian, and Antoine —- we’re looking forward to working together!

Clément at the Ocean Surface Topography (OSTST) meeting

2023-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

The meeting was held in Porto Rico, Nov. 7-11.

Clément presented an overview of the SWOT capability over ocean after the lauch of the satellite in December 2022.

Title: From low resolution gridded altimetry maps to fine scales in KaRIn images.

Authors: Clement Ubelmann (Datlas, France), Antoine Delepoulle (CLS, France); Anaelle Treboutte (CLS, France); Yannice Faugere (CLS, France); Gerald Dibarboure (CNES, France)

Abstract: While nadir altimetry is limited today to 40km (Pujol et al, 2022), the resolution of multimission gridded 2D maps available today (for ex in the Marine Copernicus Service) is still lower, more than 150km, depending of the latitude (Ballarotta, 2019). Launched on December 2022, the SWOT satellite offered us early 2023, after advanced post processing, some first images revealing signals at scales never reached before. This presentation will give a first overview of SWOT capability over ocean, and describe a processing algorithm based on the global constellation of Altimeters to calibrate medium and large scales, specific denoising for short scales, and standards (MSS, tide model) necessary to reach such resolution.

Clément and Sammy at the annual SWOT-ST meeting

2023-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

The SWOT mission is led by the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). The satellite is able to measure and survey water on over 90% of Earth’s surface, providing a high-resolution map of our planet’s water resources for the first time ever. The satellite’s measurements of freshwater and ocean masses are set to deliver new insights into the global ocean cycle impacted by climate change.

See a summary here: https://presse.cnes.fr/en/swot-international-science-team-meeting-toulouse-reveals-very-promising-first-results.

The program of the meeting can be browsed here: https://swotst.aviso.altimetry.fr/programs/2023-swot-st-program.

Research engineer position in remote-sensing ocean data inversion

2023-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

We have opened a research engineer position related to a couple of collaborative projects in which Datlas is engaged, starting in the fall of 2023 (in numerical oceanography and remote-sensing ocean data inversion, see details below).

Datlas:

Based in Saint-Martin d’Hères (38), on the university campus, DATLAS (https://www.datlas.fr/) is a cooperative of entrepreneur-researchers and -engineers working together to take up scientific and numerical challenges in environmental and climate sciences to better address societal issues.

DATLAS is a private company, created as a branch of OXALIS, a cooperative of activity and employment that provides an economic, legal, social and human framework supporting the development of DATLAS activities.

The DATLAS team currently has 7 members, with expertise in numerical methods and numerical models applied to Earth data, ranging from observations to model simulations. Our on-going activities are related to spatial observations, modeling and forecasting of the ocean and of sea ice:

Datlas is involved in activities to design and process future and present space observation missions, building on high-quality and high-resolution numerical simulations of the ocean, and on the development of innovative numerical methods and models. Datlas is also involved in activities to develop and improve numerical models of the ocean and sea ice in order to better understand existing observations and the physical processes at play, and to better forecast the physical properties that matter for operational stakeholders and end-users.

Context of the job:

Two new collaborative projects are starting in 2023, for which DATLAS is opening a position to be filled as soon as possible, in the form of a fixed-term contract for 12 months:

The World Ocean Circulation (WOC) project, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) : this is an extension of a 24-month project, which aims to deliver demonstrator algorithms for surface current reconstruction, based on available remote-sensing and in-situ observations. More specifically, the role of Datlas in this project is to estimate the inertial component of the surface current with learning methods on drifting buoy and surface wind data. An algorithm has already been prototyped over the last two years, and will need to be tested and validated on a global scale.
The ODYSEA project, funded by the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES): This CNES/NASA mission project aims at observing surface wind at the synoptic scale, and also of ocean surface current, which constitutes one of the last fundamental variables of the ocean surface dynamics that is not directly observed from satellite to date. In this project, the role of Datlas is to explore new methods of mapping of the total current (including inertial, but also geostrophy components) on the basis of highly-resolved data (from numerical simulations) and fundamental dynamical laws.

The nature and the proposed missions are detailed below, and will be refined depending on the candidate.

Missions and job description:

Mission 1 :Get started with the prototyped algorithm (written in Python) for the inertial current in its North Atlantic configuration. Get started with the datasets used (in situ and spatial data), and with the validation metrics. During this first stage, beyond the algorithmic, a critical mind on the validation of the data would be appreciated.
Mission 2 :Rescale the algorithm for a global application, which will require a revisit of the parallelization architecture and a better optimization of the reading and processing steps of the input data
Mission 3 : Based on the developed algorithm, produce a 10-year time series of surface currents, and perform its validation based on independent data. Communication to the other project partners and to ESA will be required (participation in conferences with oral presentations in English).

Requirements / Skills / Qualifications:

Masters degree (of higher) in applied mathematics and/or Earth sciences. Some experience in signal processing and scientific computing is required. Skills in Python programming with parallelization tools is recommended. An interest in geophysical fluid modeling and data inversion would be highly appreciated. Autonomy and scientific curiosity. English written and spoken.

Conditions and framework of the proposed contract:

The recruited person will be under the responsibility of the project manager Clément Ubelmann.
Workplace: Saint Martin d’Hères, in the premises of the “Maison Climat Planète.
Nature of the position = 1 year fixed-term contract starting as soon as possible in 2023.

Stephanie at the annual meeting of the SASIP project

2023-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

The meeting was held in Bergen, Norway (June 27-30) and gathered about 60 participants of 7 countries (France, US, New Zeland, UK, Norway, Germany, Italy) from all the institutions of the SASIP consortium.

The scientific program can be browsed here and the recording of the presentations is available on a dedicated Sasip Climate youtube channel.

Stephanie co-animated with her colleague Aurélie Albert from IGE, France, a “Hands-on” session, based on a cloud plateform, on how to compute a simulation with the new sea ice model neXtSIM-DG being developped as part of the project.

Sammy at the Copernicus Marine General Assembly 2023

2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Sammy presented the on-going project SLICING funded by the CMEMS-Service-Evolution program. SLICING stands for Sea Level Innovations and Collaborative Intercomparisons for the Next-Generation products. It is a CMEMS - Service Evolution project that builds collaborative data challenges for the next-generation sea level anomaly metrics, observation and mapping products. This is a collaboration between Sammy Metref and Clément Ubelmann in Datlas (lead) with Maxime Ballarotta and Clément Busché from Collecte Localisation Satellites (CLS), Ramonville St-Agne, France, and Maxime Beauchamp from IMT Atlantique Bretagne-Pays de la Loire, Brest, France.

Program of the CMEMS General assembly: https://marine.copernicus.eu/events/copernicus-marine-general-assembly-2023-0

11th International Workshop on Sea Ice Modelling, Assimilation, Observations, Predictions and Verification

2023-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

This event is hosted by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, in Oslo, Norway.

It is a joint workshop of the International Ice Charting Working Group (IICWG), the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the EUMETSAT Ocean and Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF), the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative for Sea Ice (ESA CCI), and the Sea Ice Retrieval and Data Assimilation in Norway (SIRANO). It is the 11th in a series organized with the International Ice Charting Working Group (IICWG), and it aims at improving international capabilities to perform sea ice prediction on timescales ranging from hours to a season. The aim of the workshop is to discuss cross-cutting issues in sea ice modelling, assimilation and observations and how deficiencies of current systems can be diagnosed and addressed more efficiently. General topics (sessions) include:

Sea ice data assimilation (methods and results)
Sea ice observations and uncertainties
Sea ice model parameterizations and coupling to ocean and atmosphere models
Verification approaches for sea ice analyses and forecasts
Recent research to sea ice operation transfer—Automated prediction systems

Laurent joins Datlas!

2023-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Laurent brings to Datlas his expertise in High Performance Computing and numerical modellisation of ocean and sea ice. He will join the Datlas taskforce participating in the SASIP project.

Stephanie visited the sea ice group at NERSC, Bergen.

2022-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

In the context of the SASIP project, Stephanie visited colleagues of the sea ice group at NERSC, Bergen, Norway.