BC3. Basque centre for climate change – Klima aldaketa ikergai

Short CV

María Santolaria-Otín (Dr. Université Grenoble Alpes,France,2019) has investigated the role of snow and its interaction with the climate system, from land to atmosphere snow-related processes. She started doing research on the teleconnection dynamics linking Siberian snow and Arctic sea ice with the North Atlantic Oscillation. This study was carried out during her internship at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC; Spain) as a part of the Master of Meteorology (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain).
Then, she obtained a PhD grant at the ‘Institut des Géosciences de l'Environnement’ (IGE; Grenoble, France; ARCTIC-ERA Project) allowing her to get a deeper understanding of Arctic climate and to tackle the representation of snow characteristics in climate models. More specifically, she developed diagnostic tools to evaluate CMIP5 models against observational data, such as satellite-derived products and in situ observations.She has been able to apply these diagnostics to the new generation of CMIP6 models which prompted her to participate as Contributing Author of the 6th Assessment of IPCC (WGI, Chapter 9). In parallel of her main PhD research topic, she continued working upon the teleconnection between Eurasian snow and Arctic sea ice with the North Atlantic Oscillation via international collaborations. Throughout her PhD, she has also acquired field experience in glaciological data collection in the French Alpes (as volunteer with CYME Team at IGE, GLACIOCLIM project) and in permafrost measurements in the Northern Russian Arctic thanks to the Labex OSUG@2020 PhD mobility grant and the ARCTIC-PIRE project.
Her expertise on permafrost, snow, glaciology and climate dynamics will be highly valuable for the accomplishment of her new post-doctoral research on high-mountain regions at the Basque Center of Climate Change (BC3, Leioa, Spain) granted by the iMechPro Project.