Research

The KLIRES project addresses the central challenges of decarbonizing and transforming energy systems to combat climate change while ensuring security of supply. It focuses on stronger coupling of electricity, heating/cooling, and renewable gases, as well as expanding power generation from hydropower, wind, and photovoltaics. To balance weather-related fluctuations, measures are being developed to increase system flexibility and to expand energy infrastructure for sector coupling. A particular focus is on the impacts of climate change on generation, demand, and infrastructure. Regional climate projections are used to analyze the risks and opportunities of climate change and to develop integrated planning and adaptation measures. By involving research institutions and industrial partners across the entire value chain, the project creates technical and economic added value that supports the development of future-proof energy systems.

The indiKWAtor project aims to develop a set of indicators to assess a neighborhood's climate change adaptation. An interdisciplinary approach, drawing on expertise from urban climatology, meteorology, landscape, and transportation planning, is key. Based on the assessment, further adaptation measures or studies within existing planning and development processes can be recommended for a neighborhood in the style of a decision tree. The project thus aims to facilitate the implementation of climate-proofing measures through the interface between research and practice.

The intensity of Earth’s magnetic field, which forms an important shield for our habitat, drops dramatically during geomagnetic field excursions and reversals (termed GERs). The Laschamps excursion (~41 000 years ago) occurred near during profound climatic changes that likely hadpossibly leading to drastic effects on the biosphere. While possible impacts of GERs upon the atmosphere can be theoretically expected, the magnitude, time scales, and even the direction/sign of the diverse effects on our habitat are largely unknown. The significantly weakened geomagnetic field shrinks the magnetosphere, enhancing fluxes of energetic particle fluxess from outer space reaching to the middle and lower atmosphere and even ground. The impact of GERs to another major source of energetic particles, to on the precipitation of energetic particles from the magnetosphere, e.g. from the radiation belts, is in turnalso presently unknown. The dynamics of near-Earth space and the atmosphere during GERs and their potential impacts have not yet been addressed in their full complexity, due to a lack of reliable data, precise models and interdisciplinary approaches. We will unravel key dynamics and connect physical processes in these domains during GERs and establish their environmental consequences by synergistically bringing together expertise from palaeomagnetism, magnetospheric, solar, heliospheric, atmospheric physics and climate. We will combine new geomagnetic data-based geomagnetic field models of the magnetic field state with state-of-the-art magnetospheric, atmospheric, and global Earth-system models to formfor a complete process view. To reach the goal, several breakthrough results are expected.