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Climate Research

 
Against the background of the debate on contemporary climate change, it is critical to distinguish anthropogenic climate change from natural climate variability. By drawing on historical sources, climates of the past can be reconstructed while also analyzing the societal mechanisms for adjusting to changing climatic conditions.
 
For interpreting and evaluating contemporary debate about climate and climate change, it is important to know how climate evolved historically. On the one hand, historical climate analysis offers crucial points of comparison of contemporary climates with periods of natural or quasi-natural climatic fluctuations and extremes. On the other hand, many contemporary ideas, perceptions, but also fears, errors and myths about the climate are historically rooted. For example, the question of whether or not future climate can be predicted has been a societal desire and need since time immemorial – a need that has always been met with information differing significantly in accuracy. Climate has always been subject to human interpretation and often controversial discourses, such as differentiating between earlier "God given" climates and today’s stereotypical "man-made" climate. Analyzing historical climates allows for comparisons between the present and the past and thus provides ample opportunities for better understanding both historical and contemporary climatic processes. Retrospective assessment of the climate and climate change is typically based on standardized, official instrument time series. However, relevant data series usually only date back to the mid-19th century. Using historical analyses, additional data can be included, drawing on early, non-standardized instrument recordings, which date back to the 17th Century. Beyond that time frame, more relevant data can be gleaned from written sources, such as city chronicles, personal and harvest diaries, annals and many other forms of written tradition.
 

Research Interests related to Climate Research


  • Clim`Ability Care – Transformation of business parks and industrial clusters in view of climate change: towards a new transnational corporate culture in the Upper Rhine Region
    Project Manager
    Glaser R
    Start/End of Project
    01.05.2023 until 30.04.2026
    Description
    The Upper Rhine region is particularly affected by the impacts of climate change. Heat waves and droughts, sultriness, tropical nights, but also floods and storms as well as poor air quality have an impact on people and the environment and especially also on small and medium-sized enterprises as well as the involved actors in their daily work. In the transnational research project Clim'Ability Care, several research institutions are working on how to deal with the challenges of climate change. Here it is possible to build on the findings of the previous projects Clim'Ability and Clim'Ability Design. In the new project phase Clim'Ability Care, the focus is on promoting and deriving a new climate-resilient corporate culture. The central question here is how to integrate the dimensions of warning, mitigation, adaptation and care. The specific objectives are to: (1) Selecting sites that are particularly sensitive to climate change due to their climatic and socioeconomic makeup (2) Updating and expanding the toolbox "Clim'Ability", in which climatic stressors and the resulting affectedness, but also adaptation strategies are available online (3) Promotion of a new corporate culture throughout the Upper Rhine region through "learning situations“ (4) Institutionalization through the creation of a new cross-border corporate and risk culture (5) Communication, dissemination and visibility of the project The collaboration between regional universities, public institutions and SMEs promotes synergies between different local, disciplinary and economic cultures. In parallel, the project explores the institutional and economic models and concepts with regard to the sustainability of territorial climate services in the Southern Upper Rhine region.
    Contact Person
    Gruner S
    Financing
    EU-INTERREG VI
  • Deciphering the fluvio-social metabolism of the Upper Rhine area (DEMUR) - Factors and actors in the transformation towards a fluvial anthroposphere prior to the industrial period
    Project Manager
    Blöthe J, Glaser R, Preusser F, Schenk G
    Start/End of Project
    01.04.2023 until 31.03.2026
    Description
    Human influence has long interfered with natural floodplain evolution. While the indirect effects of deforestation on sediment transport and floodplain dynamics have been extensively researched, the socio-ecological processes and feedback mechanisms that determine how fluvial systems evolve along trajectories and path dependencies have only recently entered the scientific debate. We use the concept of a fluvio-social metabolism to illustrate these complex interdependencies between anthropogenic and natural processes that define how natural river systems transitioned into a fluvial anthroposphere. The aim of the project is to decipher the fluvio-social metabolism along path-dependencies and trajectories and to understand system dynamics of the fluvial anthroposphere in the Upper Rhine area. We focus on three specific aspects and their mutual interdependencies: socio-political systems, climate dynamics, and legacy sediments, integrating social and environmental archives as well as detailed laboratory and geostatistical analysis. By combining quantitative, semi-quantitative and qualitative methods we combine social and natural sciences. We seek to determine integrating indicators for the transition from natural floodplains to a fluvial anthroposphere on multiple spatio-temporal scales. Our research analyses the period from medieval times until the onset of the industrial revolution in the region around 1850 with focus on suspected transition periods. We hypothesise that in this fluvio-social system, specific socio-natural and political constellations, including territorial shifts, economical exploitation, institutions, conflicts, climatic variability and extremes, as well as riverine floods, determined path dependencies and trajectories of fluvial landscape evolution that found their expression in the floodplain record as legacy sediments. We follow a multidisciplinary approach that integrates the expertise from different disciplines, combining historic, climatic, and geomorphologic expertise. In three interlinking work packages, we investigate how 1) actors, socio-political constellations and institutions influenced floodplain development, 2) regional climate variability and extreme events impacted socio-ecological processes, and 3) natural and societal dynamics found their expression in the floodplain sedimentary record. Synthesising these various strands of social, climatic and geomorphologic results, we ultimately aim to integrate our insights into deciphering the fluvio-social metabolism. Finally, we evaluate to which degree our results can contribute to model this dynamic fluvio-social metabolism empirically, numerically and multivariate-statistically.
    Contact Person
    Blöthe J
    Phone: 203-9224
    Email: jan.bloethe@geographie.uni-freiburg.de
    Financing
    DFG
  • Seamless coupling of kilometer-resolution weather predictions and climate simulations with hail impact assessments for multiple sectors (scClim)
    Project Manager
    Seamless coupling of kilometer-resolution weather predictions and climate simulations with hail impact assessments for multiple sectors (scClim)
    Start/End of Project
    01.02.2022 until 01.02.2025
    Description
    Socio-economic impacts of weather phenomena in a changing climate are a concern for government agencies, industry and the public, on time scales from hours (warnings) to decades (adaptation, long-term strategic planning). This project focuses on thunderstorm-related severe weather, in particular hail, one of the main weather-related damage drivers in Central Europe for agricultural crops and infrastructure, and related impacts today and in future. For further information see https://c2sm.ethz.ch/research/scclim.html.
    Financing
    SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation), Funding Scheme: Sinergia Grant
  • Geomorphic and hydrologic implications of permafrost degradation in the Alps (GeoHype)
    Project Manager
    Blöthe J, Kraushaar S
    Start/End of Project
    01.06.2018 until 01.06.2024
    Description
    High-mountain environments are highly sensitive towards a warming climate, which is dramatically reflected by the shrinkage of alpine glaciers. With more and more glaciers disappearing, attention has moved towards the hydrological importance of ice stored in the periglacial environment, projected to exceed glacier ice volume in the European Alps by the mid-21st century. However, surprisingly little is known about the current state of the ice stored in the periglacial zones of alpine landscapes. Our project aims to disentangle the contribution of active layer and permafrost body to the summer runoff from the upper Kaiserberg catchment in the Austrian Alps. To achieve this goal, we combine repeated electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) surveys on the Kaiserberg rock glacier with continuous discharge measurements from two hydrological stations that we installed in the basin. We further collect water samples over the course of the summer that are analysed for δ18O and δ2H isotopes and the radio nuclide 129I , that allow us to differentiate thawing permafrost from active-layer or precipitation derived discharge.
    Financing
    Dr. Hohmann Förderung der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Köln; Hanna Bremer Stiftung
    Publications
    Journal Articles