I am a statistician, remote sensing scientist and hydrologist with 10 years of professional and research experience, investigating the spatiotemporal dynamics of Earth surface water storage and fluxes in support of past, ongoing and planned space missions for hydrology. My goal is to reveal how global surface water availability and extremes are evolving under climate and environmental change across scales.

I am currently a Research Scientist at the French Space Agency (CNES) and the Laboratory of Space Geophysical and Oceanographic Studies (LEGOS) in Toulouse, France. I was a postdoctoral research fellow @ NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Caltech (Pasadena, CA) from 2023 to 2026. My goal is to lead and support highly motivated research activities leveraging Earth-observing satellite, model and ground data, to advance our understanding of river geometry and hydraulics, discharge and storage variability, and the mechanics of flood wave propagation. 

I am a graduate engineer with a dual degree from the French Ecole Polytechnique and ENSAE ParisTech (B.S. in Eng., 2013, M.S. in Data Sciences and Econometrics, 2015) with an extensive background in all branches of mathematics and physics. During my master's thesis, I developed mathematical tools for combinatorial game theory at Columbia University in the city of New York. Between 2015 and 2019 I worked for the French National Institute of Statistics and Economics Studies (INSEE) in Paris, France.

Embracing a new career path, I underwent a third M.S. in Meteorology, Oceanography, Climate Sciences and Remote Sensing from Sorbonne University Paris VI in 2020. For my thesis, I contributed to implementing and assessing the WRF-Hydro hydrometeorological model in the French tropical overseas territory of New Caledonia (SW Pacific) at IRD Research Institute.

I completed my Ph.D. in Earth and Space Sciences (Oct. 2020 - June 2023) at the French Aerospace Lab and National Space Agency (Onera/CNES), in Toulouse, France. During that time, I also collaborated with the INRAE Institute within the RiverLy research unit in Lyon, France. My Ph.D. research was concerned with (i) pluvial floods (PFs) detection using machine learning techniques based on the fusion of multispectral bitemporal optical and SAR remote sensing and very high spatial resolution (VHR) imagery and (ii) hydrological risk modeling with geomatics approaches.

On this site you can find more information on my research interests and publications. If you have any questions or are interested in potential collaborations, please contact me at arnaud.cerbelaud@cnes.fr. or arnaud.cerbelaud@utoulouse.fr.