Introducing LTO@AWI

Climate change is one of the key topics of our time. However, the study of ongoing climate change in the physical and chemical environment as well as their consequences for marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems and therefore mankind, is exceedingly difficult. The study of atmospheric, open ocean, deep sea or even processes in shallow coastal waters require sustained long-term observations often deploying sophisticated, costly equipment.

The AWI is in a unique position in that its scientists jointly generate a particularly large set of time series, in the Arctic, Antarctic as well as the North Sea. These data are used in the context of AWI research programmes, but also in a range of external projects and collaborations. In their entirety the AWI long-term data sets provide a unique resource for the analysis of complex long-term changes in the atmosphere, ecosystems as well as long-term changes on palaeoscales. Cruicially AWI-LTO combines these extensive data holdings with IT and modelling approaches, thus supporting the whole data life cycle from collection to publication.