Homepage of the research group

Water and climate - they are of utmost importance for us, our environment and our future. Our work faces the challenge to contribute to the following central scientific and societal relevant questions: How much water is available in a certain region? How does water availability or flooding risk change in a transient climate? Which long-term interdependencies and interactions exist between the land surface, subsurface and the overlying atmosphere? What kind of climate will we likely face untill 2100? How reliable are long-term climate projections and medium-term seasonal forecasts? Are observed and projected the hydrological and atmospherical changes statistically significant? To find answers to these questions, complex hydrological, atmospherical and coupled numerical model systems are developed, refined and applied. They are used to perform both hydrological and climatological case-studies for sensitive pilot regions. In addition multivariate statistical methods as well as data from terrestrial observatories (e.g. TERENO and WASCAL) and satellite or earthbound remote-sensing are applied.
 
The group works in close collaboration with the chair Regional Climate and Hydrology at Augsburg University, established jointly with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology – KIT.

We work on the following research topics:

• Impact of climate and land use change on water availability, flooding risks and crop yields
• Fully coupled atmosphere – hydrology simulations
• Regionalization of hydrometeorological variables by dynamical and statistical downscaling
• Predictability of hydrometeorological variables at sub-seasonal and seasonal scales
• Interaction between water-, energy- and carbon fluxes
• Quantification of small scale rainfall variability with opportunistic sensing (like commercial microwave links) and geostatistical data merging