Scientists: Marco Giorgetta (group leader), Erich Roeckner, Traute Crueger, Hui Wan, Leonidas Linardakis, Thorsten Mauritsen

Ph.D. students: Sajjad Saeed (with Wolfgang Müller), Benjamin Möbis (with Bjorn Stevens)

Scientific programmers: Monika Esch, Renate Brokopf

General aim
The overall mission is to contribute to the understanding of climate variability from interannual to centennial time scales. This comprises the response of the Earth System to both natural and anthropogenic forcings, the role of feedbacks with particular emphasis on the interactions between the physical climate system and the carbon cycle.

Research activities

• Reconstructing the climate evolution and atmospheric CO2 concentration since the middle of the 19th century taking into account both natural and anthropogenic forcings

• Climate variability recorded in proxy data, especially corals and ice cores

• Climate projections for the 21st century on the basis of SRES scenarios using the MPI-M Earth System Model (see ENSEMBLES and IPCC News on the MPI-M Press page, also available in German)

• Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to observed and projected climate change with emphasis on extreme events using both conventional and Bayesian optimal D&A methodology

• Assessing the feedbacks between projected climate change and the carbon cycle. This is a joint effort with the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena

• Developing a state-of-the-art atmospheric general circulation model ECHAM

• Developing a unified model for global and regional climate simulations and weather forecasting designed to eventually replace the current ECHAM/REMO system. This is a joint effort with the German Weather Service within the ICON project

International cooperation

• Climate Research Division / Danish Climate Centre - Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) Copenhagen, Denmark
• Frontier Research Center for Global Change - Yokohama, Japan
• Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Sciences - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, Switzerland
• International Pacific Research Center - University of Hawai'i at Manoa Honolulu, USA
• National Centre for Geophysics and Vulcanology Bologna, Italy
• Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Dept. Paleoclimatology and Paleoecology, Amsterdam, The Netherlands