The advantages of a common project

These on-going activities demonstrate the scientific complementarity of the two teams, their common motivation into collaborating, the existence of a common application domain, and the potential benefits that will emerge from a better outside visibility, and more systematically organized relationships:

• first in scientific terms:
  The AIR project developed, in collaboration with the former RODIN (next CARAVEL, next SMIS) research team, skills in defining and making integrated and pre-operational systems (e.g. DECAIR). These skills should be used in future collaborations with SMIS. On its side, CEREA is active in the domain of modeling and numerical simulation of atmospheric dispersion and also in data assimilation. Lastly the AIR project, in the domain of image processing, was specialized in environmental data processing. These three aspects are complementary and they are necessary to drive ambitious projects (CONICYT/INRIA and PROCOPE are examples of such projects).

  With hindsight examination of work made in the European contract DECAIR (scientific coordination made by Isabelle HERLIN, contract negotiated prior to collaboration with CEREA) shows that the multidisciplinary aspect: modeling/processing of observation data, would have benefited from the common project proposed in this document, in terms of: scientific realization, quality of relationships with partners and post-exploitation of results. Outsourcing the collaboration has a cost and represents a limitative factor w.r.t. the durability of realized studies. It is unfortunate, for instance, that research done on the obtention of input data for forecasting models cannot be used in an operational manner by scientific partners in the project.
  

• in terms of networkings relationships:
  The AIR project got strongly involved in European programs (DECAIR, THETIS, IWRMS), and CEREA, as a joint Laboratory ENPC/EDF R&D, is benefiting from a network of close industrial relations (INERIS, CEA, IRSN), agencies (ADEME), or public research programs in the domain (PRIMEQUAL-PREDIT, PNCA-CNRS). A problem of critical size prevented each of the two teams from developing the whole net of possible or necessary collaborations.

  A common project would benefit from a global visibility and would offer enough human resources to lead external activities, being academic, industrial or international.
  

These considerations pave the way for a closer collaboration, stated in a visible manner through a common project INRIA/ENPC, that would permit each organization to keep their scientific plans and historical partners. The expected operation must then be very flexible to keep the multidisciplinary contents.

To promote unity of research, the preferred application will be on atmospheric environment (this is the research theme, on which CEREA is developing models). This application will serve as ground to generically-aimed scientific prospects. The INRIA researchers are active in other environmental domains, in particular in soil evolution problems: erosion, dryness,..., and also in problems related to the evolution of dynamical structures.

Such a potential extension to other environmental applications outside the proper domain of atmospheric environment is facilitated by CEREA's position w.r.t. ENPC's research, which encompasses other types of applicative studies (water quality, flood forecasting,...).

We propose the following keywords, for summarizing the scientific activities of the team:

data and model coupling, processing of satellite data, data assimilation, integrated software chains, environmental applications, air pollution.