Current Position

I am currently working as Chapter Scientist for the IPCC Assessment Report 5, Chapter 9, Evaluation of Climate Models.

The chapter's Coordinating Lead Author is Jochem Marotzke and the position is BMBF-funded to ensure high quality standards in all German contributions to the IPCC AR5.

Research Interests

I am interested to quantify how much we can trust climate models, or vice versa, how wrong are global climate models?

I am working on different aspects of this question; during my PhD I did research on numerical errors that are inherent to any non-converged numerical solution.

At the moment I am analysing the benefits of multi-model ensembles (CMIP5) and I am also looking at perturbed physics ensembles (PPE) in the context of uncertainty analysis.

Key words

Numerical error estimation (for ICON Shallow water)
Automatic differentiation tools (Nagware F95)
(Empirical) Low Order Modelling for complex systems
Data assimilation
Uncertainty quantification
Ensemble techniques (PPEs vs MMEs)

Peer reviewed publications

On the use of discrete adjoints in goal error estimation for shallow water equations, ICCS 2010, F. Rauser, J. Riehme, K. Leppkes, P. Korn, U. Naumann, 2010

Predicting goal error evolution from near-initial-information: A learning algorithm, Jounral of Computational Physics, F. Rauser, P. Korn, J. Marotzke, 2011

Curriculum vitae

University

10/2001-03/2007 Philipps-Universität Marburg , "Diplomphysik" (Physics)

01/2005-07/2005 Queensland University of Technology

06/2007- 11/2011 Universität Hamburg "Dr. rer. nat. / PhD"

Ph.D. thesis

06/2007- 11/2010 "Error Estimation in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics through Learning", Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and University of Hamburg, Germany, under the supervision of Peter Korn and Jochem Marotzke

06/2007- 11/2010 Member of the IMPRS on Earth System Modeling

The thesis was awarded with the Wladimir Peter Koeppen Award, a price for the best climate-science related Ph.d. thesis in Germany 2011.

Diploma thesis

03/2007 "Construction of a Low Order Model for a GCM", Philipps-Universität Marburg, Department of Physics, and Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, under the supervision of Bruno Eckhardt, Jin-Song von Storch and Peter Korn (PDF Download)

Community Activities

I am strongly interested in the political frame work of climate change science and policy. Some of my current activities are:

I initiated the organisation of an IPCC seminar series (2008) and I have been chair of the simulated MUN Copenhagen conference (2009) here at MPI-M (Press Release (German)).
I was part of the scientific advisory team to translate the IPCC 2007 FAQs into German (Link).
I am member of the scientific advisory board for the webpage klimafakten.de.
Together with Sebastian Sonntag I am currently setting up the Young Earth System Science community to strengthen the network of Young German Earth System scientists from different graduate schools and institutions.

(Last Update April 2012)