Dr. Stella Bourdin, Climate Scientist.

My Research in a Word Cloud

I am currently a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Oxford, within the Huracán project. I obtained my PhD in Geosciences from the Université Paris-Saclay, under the direction of Sébastien Fromang at the LSCE-IPSL, with a thesis intitled “Tropical and Mediterranean Cyclone in the IPSL Climate Model: detection and assessment”

I previously obtained an engineering degree in Energy, with an internship at EDF (Electricité de France), and I kept a keen interest in the interaction between the weather and climate and the energy systems.

Research: In my research, I aim to understand the present variability of cyclonic activity to better predict the future. I am particularly interested in tropical cyclones reaching Europe and hybrid subtropical cyclones. I developed technical expertise in a suite of tools that allow me to study cyclones in any weather or climate data, including tracking (Bourdin et al. 2022), track analysis, cyclone phase space and vizualisation (see Software Development below). I work in particular with Global Climate Models (GCMs) (Bourdin et al., 2024) and seasonal hindcast simulations.

Teaching: I am passionate about the science underpinning climate change to the next generation of leaders. I have been able to do so in two of France’s best engineering schools (CentraleSupélec & ENSTA) and at the University of Oxford.

Software development: I am also passionate about open science. In particular, I invest time in developing open-source Python packages to make the analysis of cyclone track data more accessible and reproducible. Check-out my two main projects:

HuracanPy: Reading and performing basic analyses on cyclone track data
CPyS: Efficient computation of the cyclone phase space parameters (in combination with TempestExtremes).

CV.