Myriam Khodri from LOCEAN-IPSL has secured a prestigious ERC Synergy Grant for her transdisciplinary CALDERA project, along with Markus Stoffel (Institut for Environmental Sciences, Geneva, Switzerland), Salvatore Di Falco (Institute of Economics and Econometrics, Switzerland) and Patrick Fonti (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research). The four-year project aims at understanding and documenting the impacts of past major eruptions on natural climate variability with unprecedented detail using recently unearthed historical archives, tailored processing of WCRP/PAGES 2k global datasets and state-of-the-art IPSL climate model simulations over the last 2000 years. The project will also determine the relative roles of variations in solar irradiance and volcanism in the transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age climatic regimes relying on large ensembles of model simulations and proxy data-assimilation in the IPSL climate model. The holistic approach developed in the project will provide insights on the resilience of societies to the effects of past, massive volcanism, but also to comprehend the impacts of future volcanic events on crop yield, global food security and trade as well as on water and energy (within the water-energy-food nexus).
Other co-PI include Francis M. Ludlow (Trinity College of Dublin), Conor Kostick (College University of Dublin), Clive Oppenheimer (Cambridge U.) in relation to history, Deepak K. Ray (U. Minnesota), Michael J. Puma (Columbia U.) in relation to global crop production and trade, Gabriele Hegerl, Andrew Schurer (U.of Edinburgh), Erich Fischer (ETH Zurich) in relation to detection and attribution of extremes, and Evelina Trutnevyte (U. of Geneva) in relation to energy production.