Completed Projects
PRIMAVERA is a “Horizon 2020” project funded by the European Commission. The project is a collaboration between 19 European partners, led by the Met Office and the Reading University. The main objectives of the project are to develop a new generation of advanced and well-evaluated high-resolution global climate models, and perform simulations and predictions of regional climate with unprecedented fidelity.
Jan Hegewald | Thomas Jung | Stephan Juricke | Thomas Rackow | Dmitry Sein | Tido Semmler
The following projects were performed by our section members in the past.
Amending North Atlantic Model Biases to Improve Arctic Predictions
NAtMAP is an European consortium project under the ERA-Net.RUS funding scheme, with partners from the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IOPAN) and the Institute of Numerical Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INMRAS).
The AWI share is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) until mid-2018. The main goal of the project is to understand and reduce long-standing common biases in the simulated hydrography of the North Atlantic, in particular by analyzing the impact of oceanic resolution in key regions, such as the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current regions, the Labrador Sea, and the Denmark Strait. The main tool for this research is the unstructured-mesh model FESOM.
Helge Goessling | Özgür Gürses | Thomas Rackow | Dmitry Sidorenko
Understanding regional sea level change and its impacts on societies requires new forms of integrated research between natural and social sciences. The Priority Program (SPP-1889) "Regional Sea Level Change and Society (SeaLevel)", funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) performs a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis to advance our knowledge on regional, climate-related sea level change, while taking into account the associated human-environment interactions and socio-economic developments in the coastal zone.
ZUWEISS
1.5° target and the West Antarctic ice sheet
ZUWEISS is a BMBF funded project in which the benefits of a limitation of global warming to 1.5°C and 2°C are investigated.
The exceedance of critical temperature thresholds in the Southern Ocean can lead to an irreversible collapse of the West-Antarctic Ice Sheet. This would result in a sea level rise of several meters, influence the global ocean circulation and would therefore have consequences for the global climate. To determine the extent and the uncertainty of these effects under a given global warming (1.5°C, 2°C, business-as-usual: about 4°C), scenarios which are available worldwide as well as new simulations with the Alfred Wegener Institute Climate Model (AWI-CM) and a state-of-the-art ice sheet model are combined. Paleo climate scenarios are taken as a reference point and can be used to judge the quality of the model studies. The goal of this project is to work out what positive consequences a global warming limit of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level which is currently discussed in the politics would have compared to less ambitious aims such as the 2°C limit or even no attempt to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations.
Publicly available simulations of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) are used as driving data for the ice sheet model to study changes in the ice sheet and shelf ice over the next hundreds of years. To consider the feedback mechanisms between shelf ice, ocean, and atmosphere, coupled ice sheet – ocean – atmosphere simulations are computed for the first time in a high horizontal resolution and on climate time scales of several hundreds of years (Figure 1). The focus is on the Antarctic ice sheet but will be extended to changes in other regions (Arctic, northern and southern mid-latitudes, tropics) in the course of the project.
Özgür Gürses | Madlene Pfeiffer | Christian Rodehacke | Tido Semmler
