Jan Polcher

Jan Polcher is a research director at the CNRS. He is mainly interested in climate modelling of the water cycle, and in particular continental processes and their interactions with the atmosphere. He was one of the founding members of the ORCHIDEE surface model, which represents continental surfaces in the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace's Earth System Model. He is currently working on the Mediterranean water cycle, and in particular on the impact of human water use on the regional climate. To this end, he heads the team developing the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace's regional modelling infrastructure.

He founded the ‘Global Land/Atmosphere System Study’ group of the GEWEX programme and coordinated the international continental surface modelling community from 2000 to 2004. He is currently co-chair of the GEWEX programme and coordinates research on the water cycle for the World Climate Research Programme. For several years now, Jan Polcher has been teaching hydrology at the Ecole Polytechnique.

During his career he has coordinated several research projects, including the EU-funded AMMA project, which brought together more than 60 partners from Europe and Africa. Jan Polcher has supervised or co-supervised 17 doctoral theses and is the author or co-author of more than 140 articles.