Projects
This page groups my work by themes and projects, showing how individual studies fit into a broader research narrative.
Using the Past to Constrain the Future
I use observations and reconstructions of the past to constrain models and improve projections — from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to historical trends and process-based insights. This generally relies on Earth System Models (ESM) ensembles. Sub-areas below reflect different strands under this idea.
LGM reconstruction (ongoing)
Ongoing Bayesian reconstruction of LGM climate and circulation at AWI (in progress, no publication yet), focusing on integrating paleodata with ESM priors to reduce structural uncertainty and inform future projections.
Global & regional sea-level rise
Constraining and projecting sea level using historical data, semi-empirical approaches, and ESM ensembles:
- Relative sea-level projections constrained by historical trends (with M. Mengel) — latest work [21]. This builds on earlier work combining a simple climate model and fingerprints [7], as well as on the semi-empirical approaches described below.
- Robustness of semi-empirical sea-level projections, i.e. simple models calibrated from past relationship between global-mean temperature and global-mean sea-level rise [2,9].
Climate Modelling, Emulators and EMICs
Reduced-complexity models and EMICs enable efficient exploration of long-term feedbacks and policy-relevant scenarios.
- RIME/RIMEX impact emulator (with C.-F. Schleussner, N. Schwindt, E. Byers, and team) [20].
- MAGICC: reduced-complexity climate modeling in scenario assessments [7].
- CLIMBER-2 EMIC work on long-term Earth-system feedbacks [5,8].
- CLIMBER-3: contributions to next-generation EMIC development [19].
I participated in the GREENRISE project (with A. Ganopolski and colleagues at PIK) and developed a light-weight glacier model in Fortran to simulate the outlet glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The idea was to couple this lightweight glacier model to a calibrated large-scale ice-sheet model [12] to represent the narrow outlet glaciers as a subgrid scheme. The glacier model includes submarine melting driven by plume dynamics [18]. The calibration to the whole of the Greenland ice sheet has yet to be completed. Around that project we published a nice netCDF wrapper in Fortran, mostly by A. Robinson [11].
Climate Assessments
Some of my work focuses on bridging physical climate modeling with policy-oriented synthesis and assessments:
- Turn Down the Heat (World Bank) contributions [4,6].
- Cross-sector climate-risk and regional assessment work [13–14].
- Global coastal damages, adaptation costs, and protection strategies [10].
My consulting work consists in quantitative climate-risk and scenario work with Climate Analytics, Knowl-Edge, and IISD.
Early Works, Outreach and Open-Source Projects
My early works touched on operational oceanography and remote sensing:
- Biogeochemistry and ecosystem dynamics from space-based observations: Arctic primary production and ice-edge blooms via remote sensing [3].
- Flux correction via ocean data assimilation using a state-of-the-art ocean general circulation model [1].
I also invested time in the isipedia.org project led by Katja Frieler (PIK), for the dissemination of climate impact science. I co-built the site’s pipeline (taking over from Robert Giesieke) and built the interactive visualizations.
My main open-source projects include:
- papers: command-line BibTeX manager
- dimarray: early labeled array library, now superseded by xarray
- DataManifest.jl: declarative data dependency management in Julia
- bard: text-to-speech
- scribe: speech-to-text
References
See the full, up-to-date publications list.