Climate Geography

Climate geography studies the global, regional, and local climate and its interactions with the hydro-, geo-, bio, and anthroposphere across scales. The climate geography lab has a specific focus on the climatology of small-scale extreme events such as extreme precipitation, wind, and hail in the mid-latitudes. These often cause devastating damage to ecosystems and societies despite the limited spatio-temporal scales. Their variability is high in both space and time, as are the uncertainties in both observational and model data. These amplify further in complex topography of mountain regions, which are also a focus region of our research.

We study the characteristics and trends of these events, to identify and quantify the associated uncertainties. We statistically analyze high resolution weather and climate data from measurements and climate models and also connect them to other sources of data. The goal is to better understand extreme events in the context of climate change, to reduce uncertainties in observational and climate model data and so contribute to facilitating better adaptation to the consequences of extreme weather events.

Climate geography is also concerned with the impacts of extreme weather and climate events, the investigation of which specifically calls for collaborative, inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches. Together we investigate possible strategies for dealing with direct and indirect consequences from hydrometeorological hazards and the unavoidable uncertainties. In the context of risk research, probabilistic approaches in modeling the direct and indirect risks from natural hazards are developed.