An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Catherine Guiavarc'h

Ocean modelling scientist, developing and validating high-resolution coupled models.

Areas of expertise

  • Ocean general circulation modelling.

  • Air-sea fluxes interactions.

  • Coastal and equatorial waves.

Publications by Catherine

Current activities

Catherine's main role is to develop and assess global coupled models for short-range forecasts.

She is currently working on developing a high-resolution global atmosphere-ocean coupled configuration to be used for both deterministic coupled numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate time-scale simulations. The configuration is based on the Unified Model with 17 km horizontal resolution (N768) and on the NEMO model with a 1/12th degree resolution (ORCA12).

She is also involved in assessing the impact of including the wave model in the short-range forecast coupled system and understanding the impact of a number of wave-ocean and wave-atmosphere interactions.

Career background

Catherine joined the Ocean Forecasting R&D group of the Met Office in September 2008. Before joining the Short-Range Coupled Forecast development team in 2012, she worked in the Marine Dynamics team on air-sea fluxes interactions and ocean model sensitivity to atmospheric forcing.

Prior to joining the Met Office, she did a postdoc at the Laboratoire de Physique des Oceans (January 2007 to April 2008) working on the development of a 1/12th degree configuration of the Tropical and the North Atlantic Ocean and studying the intraseasonal variability on the continental slope.

Catherine did a PhD in Physical Oceanography at the Laboratoire de Physique des Oceans and at the Laboratoire Environnement Profond (December 2003 to December 2006). Catherine worked on the modelling of the currents in the Gulf of Guinea focusing on deep equatorial and coastal waves. In order to understand the mechanism of biweekly oscillations observed in the Gulf of Guinea, she developed a high-resolution regional model based on NEMO.

Catherine studied for a Bachelor's degree in Physics at the University of Western Brittany and for a Master's degree in physical oceanography at the European Institute of Marine Studies (2002/2003)