Volker Wulfmeyer (born 8 October 1965) [1] is a German physicist, meteorologist, climate and earth system researcher, university professor, and member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. [2] [3]
Wulfmeyer received his doctorate in 1995 from the University of Hamburg and Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology under Hartmut Graßl and Jens Bösenberg in the Department of Geosciences with the thesis "DIAL Measurements of Vertical Water Vapor Distributions". [4] Under a Feodor Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher and leader of the joint NOAA-NCAR lidar research team in Boulder (Colorado), US, from 1996 to 1998, and as a scientist at NCAR from 1998 to 2000. [5]
Since February 2001, Wulfmeyer is a university professor, the managing director of the Institute of Physics and Meteorology and holder of the Chair of Physics and Meteorology at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart. [6] [7]
Based on his work at NOAA and NCAR, Wulfmeyer developed suitable sensor synergies to study turbulent transport processes in the convective boundary layer, mesoscale circulations in complex terrain, exchange processes at the land surface, entrainment processes at the top of the boundary layer, and generally to study land-atmosphere feedback. [8] [9] [10] [11]
In parallel, his team at the University of Hohenheim further optimized the WRF-NOAHMP land-atmosphere model, which has been used for a wide variety of model studies, including turbulence analyses, air pollution over Stuttgart, bio-geoengineering approaches, high-resolution weather forecasts, impact studies for data assimilation, and regional climate simulations. [12] [13] [14] In this context, his institute contributed to the latest regional climate projections for Europe within the BMBF project ReKliEs-De and the EURO-CORDEX project of the World Climate Research Program. [15] [16]
In recent years, machine learning approaches have also found their way into this research portfolio, e.g., to study exchange processes at the land surface. [17] Currently, his team is expanding the Land Atmosphere Feedback Observatory (LAFO), which is used to study the land-atmosphere system. [18]
Since 2020 Wulfmeyer is a member of the WCRP panel Global Land/Atmosphere System Study (GLASS) of the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX). [19] [20]
Being a co-signer of the declaration "Scientists for Future" and co-founder of the regional group of this movement in Stuttgart, Wulfmeyer also deals with problems and issues raised by climate change. [21] [22] As part of this commitment, Wulfmeyer initiated the founding of the Climate Crisis Working Group at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which held a series of lectures on the subject and published a special issue. [23] [24]
Numerical climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the important drivers of climate, including atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. They are used for a variety of purposes from study of the dynamics of the climate system to projections of future climate. Climate models may also be qualitative models and also narratives, largely descriptive, of possible futures.
A radiosonde is a battery-powered telemetry instrument carried into the atmosphere usually by a weather balloon that measures various atmospheric parameters and transmits them by radio to a ground receiver. Modern radiosondes measure or calculate the following variables: altitude, pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind, cosmic ray readings at high altitude and geographical position (latitude/longitude). Radiosondes measuring ozone concentration are known as ozonesondes.
Julius Ferdinand von Hann was an Austrian meteorologist. He is seen as a father of modern meteorology.
Aeolus, or, in full, Atmospheric Dynamics Mission-Aeolus (ADM-Aeolus), was an Earth observation satellite operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). It was built by Airbus Defence and Space, launched on 22 August 2018, and re-entered the atmosphere over Antarctica in a controlled manner and burned up on 28 July 2023. ADM-Aeolus was the first satellite with equipment capable of performing global wind-component-profile observation and provided much-needed information to improve weather forecasting. Aeolus was the first satellite capable of observing what the winds are doing on Earth, from the surface of the planet and into the stratosphere 30 km high.
The US National Center for Atmospheric Research is a US federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NCAR has multiple facilities, including the I. M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Studies include meteorology, climate science, atmospheric chemistry, solar-terrestrial interactions, environmental and societal impacts.
In atmospheric science, an atmospheric model is a mathematical model constructed around the full set of primitive, dynamical equations which govern atmospheric motions. It can supplement these equations with parameterizations for turbulent diffusion, radiation, moist processes, heat exchange, soil, vegetation, surface water, the kinematic effects of terrain, and convection. Most atmospheric models are numerical, i.e. they discretize equations of motion. They can predict microscale phenomena such as tornadoes and boundary layer eddies, sub-microscale turbulent flow over buildings, as well as synoptic and global flows. The horizontal domain of a model is either global, covering the entire Earth, or regional (limited-area), covering only part of the Earth. The different types of models run are thermotropic, barotropic, hydrostatic, and nonhydrostatic. Some of the model types make assumptions about the atmosphere which lengthens the time steps used and increases computational speed.
Erich Rudolf Alexander Regener was a German physicist known primarily for the design and construction of instruments to measure cosmic ray intensity at various altitudes. He is also known for predicting a 2.8 K cosmic background radiation, for the invention of the scintillation counter which contributed to the discovery of the structure of the atom, for his calculation of the charge of an electron and for his early work on atmospheric ozone. He is also credited with the first use of rockets for scientific research.
Carmen Nicole Moelders is an American atmospheric scientist. Her work is mainly focused on hydrometeorology, mesoscale meteorology, cloud physics, land-atmosphere interaction, air pollution, wildfire modeling, and wind power modeling.
Climate change feedbacks are effects of global warming that amplify or diminish the effect of forces that initially cause the warming. Positive feedbacks enhance global warming while negative feedbacks weaken it. Feedbacks are important in the understanding of climate change because they play an important part in determining the sensitivity of the climate to warming forces. Climate forcings and feedbacks together determine how much and how fast the climate changes. Large positive feedbacks can lead to tipping points—abrupt or irreversible changes in the climate system—depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change.
Annette Zippelius is a German physicist at the University of Göttingen. In 1998 she became a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize winner. Her research focuses on complex fluids and soft matter – materials that are intermediate between conventional liquids and solids. Examples are glasses, polymeric melts or solutions, gels and foams, but also granular matter. With her research group she aims at elucidating the underlying principles of self-organization that govern their behavior.
The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a fully coupled numerical simulation of the Earth system consisting of atmospheric, ocean, ice, land surface, carbon cycle, and other components. CESM includes a climate model providing state-of-art simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future. It is the successor of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), specifically version 4 (CCSMv4), which provided the initial atmospheric component for CESM. Strong ensemble forecasting capabilities, CESM-LE, were developed at the onset to control for error and biases across different model runs (realizations). Simulations from the Earth's surface through the thermosphere are generated utilizing the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM). CESM1 was released in 2010 with primary development by the Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and significant funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DoE).
Atmospheric lidar is a class of instruments that uses laser light to study atmospheric properties from the ground up to the top of the atmosphere. Such instruments have been used to study, among other, atmospheric gases, aerosols, clouds, and temperature.
Albert Joseph Maria Defant was an Austrian meteorologist, oceanographer and climatologist. He published fundamental works on the physics of the atmosphere and ocean and is regarded as one of the founders of physical oceanography.
The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology is an internationally renowned institute for climate research. Its mission is to understand Earth's changing climate. Founded in 1975, it is affiliated with the Max Planck Society and the University of Hamburg, and is based in Hamburg's district of Eimsbüttel. Its founding director was the Nobel laureate Klaus Hasselmann. The current managing director is Bjorn Stevens.
The United Arab Emirates Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science (UAEREP) is a global research initiative offering a grant of US$5 million over a three-year period to be shared by up to five winning research projects in the field of rain enhancement.
Anne Mee Thompson is an American scientist, who specializes in atmospheric chemistry and climate change. Her work focuses on how human activities have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, climate forcing, and the Earth's oxidizing capacity. Thompson is an elected fellow of the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and AAAS.
Heinz Artur Raether was a German physicist. He is best known for his theoretical and experimental contributions to the study of surface plasmons, as well as for Kretschmann-Raether configuration, a commonly-used experimental setup for the excitation of surface plasmon resonances.
Ulrike Lohmann is a climate researcher and professor for atmospheric physics at the ETH Zurich. She is known for her research on aerosol particles in clouds.
Ricarda Winkelmann is a German mathematician, physicist, and climatologist. She is a professor of Climate System Analysis at Potsdam University and the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research. She studies interdependencies between climate, land ice, and the ocean.
Ernst Heinrich Paul Albert Wigand, known as Albert Wigand, was a German professor who lectured in the fields of physics, geodesy, meteorology and climatology. His is most well-known as one of the earliest physicists to successfully devise a method of studying fog and cloud matter in mid-air. In his later years, he became a fierce supporter of the xenophobic and nationalist thinking that would underpin Nazi ideology, and that association has clouded his legacy.