The Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (French: Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, LSCE), created in 1998 is both an institution and joint research unit (UMR 8212) of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (French: Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, CEA), the French National Centre for Scientific Research (French: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS), and the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin (UVSQ). CEA will be the legal entity that represents the LSCE within this project. The LSCE aims to understand past and future climate evolution and to predict the changes our planet will have to face in the next decades and centuries due to the global increase in greenhouse gases. The LSCE has participated in numerous national and international research and private sector projects since its foundation about activities related to this proposal. With more than 310 staff members, the LSCE is an associated laboratory of the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL) that brings together nine research laboratories working on the global environment. Through the IPSL, the LSCE participates to two French laboratories of excellence (LABEX) using the IPSL Climate model, one of the top 10 most powerful climate models in the world. The LSCE contributes greatly to the IPSL strategy for the study of the “Earth System” at various spatial and temporal scales. The LSCE has a leading international expertise in carbon cycle and climate modelling, the assimilation of data on land surface properties, as well as measurements of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and inversions of their fluxes going from regional to national and global scales. The LSCE has been heavily involved in the Global Carbon Project, as is illustrated by globalcarbonatlas.org, an online platform to explore global and regional carbon data that it has developed through a philanthropic grant. It has strong participation in PMIP and CMIP projects on numerical simulation of the climate, and control of the modelling infrastructure project IS-ENES, has a leading role in the creation of the Climate-JPI, as well as the coordination of Charmex, and contribution to SICMED MERMEX. The LSCE is also a major contributor to the recent IPCC report. The LSCE produces about 250 publications per year. Many are published in the most prestigious international journals in the discipline, such as Nature, Science, PNAS, NatureGeoscience, with a higher than average impact factor of 8. The average number of citations per paper is approximately 14. Additionally, 31% of publications the LSCE are among the 10% most cited publications in the world in Geosciences and 6% are part of the 1% most cited publications.
The LSCE will provide atmospheric inversion expertise and tools at global, regional and local scales in order (i) to test the new column retrievals generated by the project, (ii) to test the joint assimilation of those retrievals with solar induced fluorescence retrievals, and (iii) to perform observing system simulation experiments that will assess the capability of future satellite CO2 imagery to monitor the CO2 emissions and that will allow dimensioning the complementary surface network. CEA will also participate in the intercomparison between the carbon source/sink estimates from the top-down and bottom-up approaches at various time and space scales. The LSCE will co-lead WP4.