The response of trade cumulus clouds to warming is a major uncertainty in climate projections. In the last decade, a hypothesis was developed according to which the interplay of convection and cloud cover leads to increased warming.

In a recent study in Journal of Climate Moritz Günther, Hauke Schmidt, Claudia Timmreck (all MPI-M), and Matthew Toohey (University of Saskatchewan) argue why the cooling following large volcanic eruptions is smaller than what one might expect from simple energy balance arguments.

An autumn tour of Germany's scientific landscape also took the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, to Hamburg on October 25, 2022 to the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ).

How fast the Northern Hemisphere forest macro ecosystem tracks strongly warming climates such as projected for the near future is largely unknown. In a recent study published in Nature Communication, scientists investigated the Northern Hemisphere forest expansion after the last glacial maximum. They compared a new synthesis of pollen-based…

The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) has opened a new chapter in Earth System Modelling that has been a dream for climate scientists and seemed very distant for ages.

In a new study, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology have investigated what caused African humid periods to vary in duration and strength in the past. They found that changes in the Earth´s orbit are the most important factor and that there is a critical threshold that affects the onset of a greening Sahara. This threshold for…

A new supercomputer named “Levante” was inaugurated at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) on 22 September 2022. For the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, it represents the essential research infrastructure for climate modeling. The supercomputer is virtually the laboratory and main tool of the researchers and thus of utmost importance…

Prof. Klaus Hasselmann, founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and Nobel Laureate in Physics 2021, was honored with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Schloss Bellevue in Berlin on September 2, 2022. He receives the award for his services to climate research.…

Dr. Peter Landschützer, scientist in the department "The Ocean in the Earth System" at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and head of the group "Observations, Analysis and Synthesis", will be the new research director at the Belgian Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee (VLIZ; Flanders Marine Institute) in Ostend. Starting in September 2022,…

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) awarded the Roddam Family Medal for the best PhD thesis in 2020 to Dr. Chetankumar (“Chetan”) A. Jalihal, who has been working in the department “The Ocean in the Earth System” at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) since August 2020, first in a scholarship, now as a postdoctoral scientist. He…