Permalink: https://agate.academy/id/PR435

Großräumige Klimaänderungen und ihre Bedeutung für die Umwelt

The aim of the research project, which is scheduled to run until 2018, is to record and understand the mechanisms of the Earth's climate system, its responses to external drives (increasing greenhouse gases, solar variability, volcanic eruptions, etc.) and their effects on the anthroposphere. The basis of the research tasks, which include diagnostics and a possible forecast of climate change, is primarily weather observation data. With a focus on the evaluation of observational data, this project is one of the rarest in Germany. Therefore, the planning and progress of the project are largely determined by the availability of the data.

Already on the basis of observations that are generally still difficult to access, this project has provided important impulses for understanding climate variability through peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and contributions to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

On the basis of increasingly available global data of increasing quality, modern statistical methods are used today to analyse spatial-temporal relationships both between different climate elements and between climate elements and parameters that characterise other components of the climate system (properties of the earth's surface such as soil moisture, vegetation). These analyses aim at uncovering regions of the Earth's surface and their teleconnections in 4D view, which essentially contribute to the variability of the global climate. The investigations gradually move from coarse temporal resolution (month, season) to daily and 6-hour values in order to identify potential regions susceptible to extreme weather and climate events and to investigate the underlying physical mechanisms. The aim is to link global data with high temporal and spatial resolution, but covering only short periods of time, with the worldwide scattered, relatively few long measurement series (about 100 years) of meteorological parameters. The statistical analyses form the basis for the development of hypotheses and conceptual models of the mechanisms of action in the climate system, which are verified on the basis of independent observational data and the results of climate models.

Running time
1981-2013
Project type
Data Repository

Contact person for the academies' programme

Sebastian Zwies M.A.

Geschäftsstelle Mainz
Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 2
55131 Mainz

Tel: 06131/218 528-17
E-Mail: sebastian.zwies@akademienunion.de