Do we understand the migration of global vegetation patterns over the last millennia during the transition from the mid Holocene some 8000 years ago to present-day climate? Can we even predict what to expect in paleo-botanical records based on what we know? To tackle these questions Anne Dallmeyer, Martin Claussen (both MPI-M), Ulrike Herzschuh…

Thirteen scientists from Germany, France and the United States collaborated to collect measurements and process them into a dataset that provides a rich characterization of the thermodynamic and kinematic aspects of the atmosphere in the North Atlantic trades. The effort was led by Dr. Geet George, a post-doctoral scientist at the Max Planck…

The wait is over: our founding director was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 in a ceremony at the Harnack House in Berlin on December 7, 2021.

In a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, Dr. Lukas Kluft, Dr. Sally Dacie, Prof. Dr. Bjorn Stevens (scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology) and Dr. Manfred Brath and Prof. Dr. Stefan A. Buehler (both scientists at Universität Hamburg) show that the use of a widely used radiative transfer scheme leads to incorrect predictions…

A joint team of the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), the Stockholm University, and the Intel Corporation has won the SC21 Best Visualization Award for their visualization “Putting the Ocean into the Center: A coupled ICON Atmosphere/Ocean Simulation in Spilhaus Projection”.

After the global average of fossil carbon dioxide emissions dropped significantly in 2020, this year they are again approaching levels before the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the finding of the Global Carbon Project (GCP). Every year, scientists take stock of how much CO₂ has been anthropogenically emitted around the world and is absorbed again by…

In a new study in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems Theresa Lang, Dr. Ann Kristin Naumann, Prof. Bjorn Stevens and Prof. Stefan A. Bühler show that the model disagreement in the distribution of tropical humidity is reduced in the next generation of global climate models.

NextGEMS is building prototypes for a new generation of Earth system models to advance science, guide policy, and inform applications to support the sustainable management of our planet. As a collaborative European project funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 programme, NextGEMS will tap expertise from fourteen European Nations to develop two next…

Prof. Dr. Klaus Hasselmann completed his 90^th year of life on October 25, 2021. The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) warmly congratulates its founding director on this special birthday. His contributions to the scientific and public understanding of climate change were groundbreaking, which is underpinned by the award of the Nobel Prize…

Rising fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions deplete the atmospheric concentrations of the heavy carbon isotope ¹³C. This phenomenon, called the ¹³C Suess effect, can be used to discern the pathways of anthropogenic carbon in the Earth system. In a new study, Dr. Bo Liu, Dr. Katharina D. Six, and Dr. Tatiana Ilyina investigated the sources of uncertainty in an…