Knowledge Transfer
Our research on the climate system extends beyond academic settings. We actively work to share our findings and approaches with policymakers, industry, educators, and the public, ensuring that climate science informs decision-making and practical solutions. Through climate change projections, operational modeling systems, storylines, and AI-driven climate services, we bridge the gap between research and society.
Our research is highly applied, contributing to climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. This includes:
- Providing climate change projections to support policy and decision-making.
- Developing the first operational climate projection system as part of the Destination Earth Initiative, which will deliver real-time, high-resolution climate simulations for impact assessments.
- Creating storylines to make the impacts of climate change more tangible and relevant for different sectors and communities.
We address key questions such as:
- What is a climate model, and how does it work?
- What questions can climate models answer—and what are their limitations?
- How will the climate evolve in the coming decades?
- How do rapid climate changes in polar regions impact global weather patterns, including those in Europe?
- What observations in the Arctic and Antarctic are most urgently needed to improve our understanding, models, and predictions of the atmosphere, sea ice, and ocean?
Understanding climate change is not just about numbers and graphs—it is about real-world impacts. We develop storylines that help people, industries, and policymakers visualize and prepare for climate-related risks, such as extreme weather, shifts in regional climates, and long-term environmental changes.
One of our key initiatives is ClimSight—a prototype of a local climate service platform that uses large language models to provide tailored climate insights. ClimSight makes climate information accessible to everyone, from decision-makers to the general public, by delivering localized climate projections in an intuitive and user-friendly way.
We are committed to translating scientific knowledge into actionable insights and fostering discussions on climate change. Our efforts include:
- Public events and lectures to engage diverse audiences.
- Collaboration with policymakers and industry to support informed decision-making.
- Science communication in media and online platforms to make climate research accessible.
- Educational partnerships to integrate climate science into curricula.
Explore our selected contributions below, and feel free to reach out with further questions or comments. We welcome your inquiries—contact Ms. Ke Li for more information!
Knowledge Transfer Examples
Video: How climate change alters their evolution and impacts
New high-resolution narrated climate story videos -”From Past to Future”-use visual storytelling to replay historical extreme weather events under different climate conditions—revealing how climate change alters their evolution and impacts. Developed within Destination Earth’s Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin, these videos offer a powerful new way to explore local consequences of global warming. For more information, please visit the ECMWF website.
Storyline simulation: a powerful tool for climate research
Climate change is not just an abstract, complex change of weather statistics. Climate change is present in the weather of every single day – and it is not the same each day!
Consider a summer day somewhere in Europe with an Atlantic ocean breeze, and compare it to a day influenced by winds blowing from the continent. The latter will tend to be more strongly affected by climate change, simply because the continents warm more strongly than the oceans.
Can we be more specific? Yes! By using a climate model in a special way, where the winds are forced to follow the observed winds, we simulate the 'climate change signal of the day'. Every day and everywhere. Just a few days behind real-time. And with this tool, you can have a look and explore our storyline simulations yourself.
Our results have limitations and are not perfect. We use just one climate model, and other models will give somewhat different results. Our model is coarse, using grid boxes as wide as 100km, so a lot of detail is lost. And finally, this storyline method only extracts the 'thermodynamical' component of climate change, meaning that it necessarily ignores possible (but mostly rather uncertain) changes of wind patterns.
For these reasons, we consider our storyline simulation system a prototype. The approach has already proven to be a powerful tool for climate research, as showcased in a recent publication in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment. By making climate change very tangible, we envision climate storylines like ours to become an important piece of the future dissemination portfolio of climate change information.
For more information, please visit AWI Climate Storylines.
Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) coordinates climate model simulations worldwide under the World Climate Research Program (WCRP). CMIP's goal is to better understand and predict past, present, and future climate change in a multi-model context. In order to compare model results, CMIP is developing standards for simulations, data formats, and evaluation algorithms, among other things. This will give climate researchers the ability to directly share, compare, and evaluate their findings with each other. The data products of the sixth phase of CMIP (CMIP6, Eyring et al. 2016, GMD, 9, 1937-1958, 2016, doi:10.5194/gmd-9-1937-2016) thus represent, in addition to observational data, an important source of robust and reliable climate information in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. The scenario subproject of CMIP6, ScenarioMIP, involved a total of about 27 institutions worldwide with 32 to 38 (depending on the scenario) different models or model configurations (Tebaldi et al. 2021, Earth Syst. Dynam., 12, 253-293, 2021, doi:10.5194/esd-12-253-2021). The calculations for the German contributions to this were performed partly by DKRZ and mostly on DKRZ's high-performance computer Mistral. For more information, please visit CMIP6.
