Canal-U

Joel Guiot, is directeur de recherche CNRS in the "Centre Europeen de Recherche et d'Enseignement en Géosciences de l'Environnement", CEREGE, in Aix-en-Provence (France). He is also the director of the Research Federation ECCOREV which is a group a more than 36 laboratories in various domain of sciences and social sciences related to environment. His main research domain is paleoclimatology, particularly climate reconstruction in continental areas. His main contribution to that field was (1) to show how insolation fluctuations (Milankovitch cycles) influence vegetation and climate (paper published by Nature in 1989), (2) to help to the pollen database development which enabled climatic syntheses in Europe and Africa (numerous papers), (3) to show how strong interaction with climate modellers enable to understand the effect of climatic forcings on past climate and to test the realism of climate models. Recently, he demonstrated that atmospheric CO2 may induce biases on our statistical approaches by using an inverse modelling approach (several papers including a PNAS paper in 2007). He studies also the effect of future climate changes on the Mediterranean forest and presently he works on the climate reconstruction and modelling in Europe, Africa and South America on the last 1000 years. He is author or co-author of more than 150 scientific papers in international journals. He obtained the silver medal of CNRS in 2005. He has (co-)supervised 16 PhD. students and is member of several national and international scientific committees.

References :

· Guiot, J., Beaulieu, J. L. de, Pons, A., and Reille, M., 1989. A 140,000-year climatic reconstruction from two European pollen records. Nature, 338, 309-313.

· Wu H., Guiot J., Brewer S., Guo Z. Peng C., 2007 Dominant Factors Controlling Glacial and Interglacial Variations in the Treeline Elevation in Tropical Africa. PNAS, 104 (23), 9720-9724. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0610109104.

· Nicault, A., Alleaume, S., Brewer, S., Carrer, M., Nola, P., Guttierez, E., Edouard, J.L., Urbinati, C., Guiot, J., 2008.

· Mediterranean drought fluctuation during the last 500 years based on tree-ring data. Climate Dynamics, 31 (2-3), 227-245, erratum p.2

· Jansen E. & Overpeck, J., 2007. Paleoclimate (chap 6). IPCC: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm

· Hillaire-Marcel, C. & De Vernal A., 2007. Developments in Marine Geology, Vol 1, C. Hillaire-Marcel & A. De Vernal (eds), Elsevier, Amsterdam, DOI 10.1016/S1572-5480(07)01018-4

· Nicault, A., Alleaume, S., Brewer, S., Carrer, M., Nola, P., Guttierez, E., Edouard, J.L., Urbinati, C., Guiot, J., 2008. Mediterranean drought fluctuation during the last 500 years based on tree-ring data. Climate Dynamics, 31 (2-3), 227-245, erratum p.247.

· Guiot, J., Hély-Alleaume, C., Wu, H.B., Gaucherel, C., 2008a. Interactions between vegetation and climate variability: what are the lessons of models and paleovegetation data, C. R. Geoscience, 340, 595-601. doi:10.1016/j.crte.2008.01.001

· Goosse H., P.Y. Barriat, W. Lefebvre, M.F. Loutre and V. Zunz, 2008. Introduction to climate dynamics and climate modeling - Online textbook available at http://www.climate.be/textbook

· Bradley, R.S., 1999. Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary. International Geophysics Series, vol 68, Elsevier, San Diego.