Laure Moinat

BG Biogeosciences

The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Laure Moinat for the poster/PICO entitled:

Development of a new biogeodynamical tool for exploratory climate modelling (Moinat, L.; Franziskakis, F.; Vérard, C.; Goldberg, D.; Brunetti, M.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Laure Moinat is a PhD student in the Group of Applied Physics and the Institute for Environmental Sciences, as well as an affiliated researcher in the Life in the Universe Center at the University of Geneva. Her research focuses on modelling abrupt climatic changes that occurred in the past and can potentially happen under the present-day climate crisis. Several tipping elements exist in the climate system -- such as the overturning ocean circulation and the ice sheets -- that may trigger shifts between ‘greenhouse’ and ‘icehouse’ regimes under different forcing scenarios. Numerically simulating these tipping elements and their interactions presents significant challenges, as slow-response components, such as the deep ocean, vegetation, and ice sheets, must be evolved alongside fast-response ones.

At EGU 2025, Laure presented a coupled climate setup, biogeodyn-MITgcmIS, which uses the MIT general circulation model as its dynamical core and offline couples vegetation, hydrology, and a newly developed global-scale ice sheet model. Following a biogeodynamical approach, where vegetation cover evolves consistently with the climate system over multimillennial timescales for arbitrary land and ocean configurations, this coupled setup is computationally efficient compared with traditional state-of-the-art climate models. In this poster, biogeodyn-MITgcmIS is evaluated favourably against two CMIP-class models with dynamic vegetation for the pre-industrial period.