I started to work on climate variability at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) in 1992, where I did my PhD. I worked as a postdoc in Météofrance (Toulouse), 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 was group leader at the Institut Català de Ciències del Clima from 2010 to 2015. I now lead the Department of Earth Sciences of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), which hosts more than 130 engineers, physicists, mathematicians and social scientists working on supercomputing and data analysis to provide the best information and services on climate and air quality. I am author of more than 200 peer-reviewed papers (h index 66, Google Scholar), lead author of the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports of the IPCC, member of several international scientific committees and direct supervisor of around 20 postdocs, engineers and PhD students.

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, the Arctic and Southern Europe. I develop this model to explore the advantages of increasing its resolution to better reproduce the physical processes at the origin of climate variability. I also use 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 one of my main targets to try to make a change in both society and the economy.