I started working on climate variability at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) in 1992, where I did my PhD. I then worked as a postdoc in Météofrance (Toulouse, France), at the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aerospacial (Torrejón, Spain) and for ten years at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (Reading, UK). I am the head of the Department of Earth Sciences of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), where I coordinate the largest FP7 project on climate prediction. The Department hosts more than 50 engineers, physicists, mathematicians and other air quality and climate researchers who try to bring the latest developments in supercomputing and Big Data to provide the best information and services. I am author of more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, member of several international scientific committees and supervisor of several postdocs and one PhD student.

Research interests

Global climate is highly variable, which implies that there is much more to understand than just climate change. Climate prediction aims at predicting the variations of climate at different time scales, ranging from one month to several years beyond the start of the forecast. I use an Earth system model based on differential equations to explore the limits of the forecast quality over different parts of the globe, in particular over Africa, South America and Southern Europe, and statistical techniques to adapt the resulting climate information to specific user needs. Improving the application of this climate information to different socio-economic sectors, with a special focus on energy and disaster risk management, is the final target.