Climate: Past, Present & Future

Can we improve our understanding of extreme precipitation events in the Sichuan Basin by using high-resolution regional climate models?

Laura Detjen and Julia Curio April 7, 2025

The Tibetan Plateau is an elevated region with an average height of 4500 m, located in high-mountain Asia (Photo Credit: Julia Curio)

Invited guest from the EGU 2024 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award Context The Sichuan Basin, located at the eastern slope of the Tibetan Plateau in China, is a lowland region that regularly experiences heavy rainfall during the summer months. This is due to its complex topographical features (Fig. 1) and the influence of the East Asian monsoon. The heavy rainfall can ...[Read More]

Open climate science is brave climate science

Martin Wegmann and Lena Thöle December 6, 2024

Open Science brings people and data together. Source: Adobe Firefly

Why are we climate scientists? For us, there is a number of reasons: we feel a strong bond to nature, we like to solve puzzles and we want to understand the mechanisms of what we see every day. And – even if it only manifests at the end of a causal chain – we want to contribute to a just and livable world via working in climate science. Thus, due to distant and abstract state funding ...[Read More]

Modelling the heat mitigation effects of blue roofs and green roofs to assess climate change adaptation potentials in dense urban environments

Nils Eingrüber May 3, 2024

Urban areas often show higher temperatures than their surrounding rural areas, especially during heat events. This phenomenon is called the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. The magnitude of the UHI effect is expressed by the absolute temperature difference between the rural and the urban area and can reach more than 10 °C. During past decades, the magnitude of the UHI effect has intensified in many ...[Read More]

Misinterpretation of glacial aridity in subtropical environments in the Southern Hemisphere

Dr Rieneke Weij and Dr Kale Sniderman March 11, 2024

Figure 2. A chamber in one of the Naracoorte caves beautifully decorated with speleothem formations. Source: Rieneke Weij.

To understand Earth’s changing climate, scientists often examine how the climate has varied in the past, by studying geological records. These records allow us to reconstruct past climates and help us predict planet’s responses to different climate forcings. In this context, it has long been thought that past ice ages on Earth were relatively dry, whereas the warm periods between ice ages we ...[Read More]