Ongoing Projects
Artemics- Arctic internal wave energetics, mixing, and their interdependence with sea ice in changing climate conditions
This DFG funded Emmy-Noether project will in 3+3 years (2025-2031) investigate the role of internal wave-driven mixing for Arctic sea ice decline. We will develop the first physics-based mixing parameterization for the Arctic by testing and extending the IDEMIX framework, an internal wave model and as such state-of-the-art energy constrained mixing parameterization. It will be evaluated against observational estimates of Arctic internal wave energy and mixing, which we will obtain i.a. from AWI-led research cruises in collaboration with the Physical Oceanography section. We will couple IDEMIX to FESOM and AWI-ESM to analyze how wave-driven mixing in the warming Arctic affects the ocean state and dynamics and test whether there indeed is a positive feedback loop between sea ice melt on the one hand and internal wave generation and mixing on the other hand. Lastly, we will explore how these changes within the Arctic affect processes beyond, like deep-water formation and overturning in the (North) Atlantic Ocean.
Friederike Pollmann | Ekaterina Bagaeva | Gabriela Amaral Wasielsky
Arctic Gates
The ARCTIC GATES project investigates whether reducing the export of sea ice through key Arctic gateways, particularly the Fram and Nares Straits, could slow the loss of Arctic sea ice. Using state-of-the-art climate models, the project will simulate the impacts of restricting sea-ice export under present-day and future warmer climate conditions. The research will assess not only the effectiveness of such interventions in preserving Arctic sea ice, but also potential unintended consequences for the Arctic and wider Northern Hemisphere climate system. A particular focus will be placed on risks, side effects, and reversibility, including how the climate system responds if an intervention is discontinued. Overall, ARCTIC GATES aims to provide a rigorous scientific assessment of the feasibility, effectiveness, and risks of a potential Arctic sea-ice preservation strategy.
The DFG-funded CAP7 project supports the Fast Track phase of CMIP7, which is crucial for delivering insights to the next IPCC report. By developing on the advanced Climate and Earth system models ICON, AWI-CM3, and AWI-ESM3, CAP7 strengthens Germany’s contribution to global climate projections. These models are tailored to meet CMIP7 requirements, performing DECK simulations and enabling emission-driven projections to understand greenhouse gas impacts more accurately. Additionally, CAP7 will improve the Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) to ensure robust analysis, providing high-quality climate projections that enhance international understanding of climate change.
Laszlo Hunor Hajdu | Jan Streffing | Nadine Wieters
CLAIMA
CLAIMA will develop a European AI-driven Digital Twin Platform for Climate that combines state-of-the-art generative AI, foundation models, climate emulators, learned downscaling, and scalable computing into an open, modular, and interoperable research infrastructure for climate science and decision-making. By integrating and rigorously validating cutting-edge AI climate models within a standards-based platform, the project will enable orders-of-magnitude faster climate simulations, high-resolution climate information, and seamless weather-to-climate projections while maintaining scientific robustness and reproducibility. Designed for deployment on European HPC and AI Factory infrastructures and aligned with initiatives such as Destination Earth, the platform will provide pre-operational AI capabilities ready for uptake by research, industry, and public services. CLAIMA will demonstrate its impact through flagship applications in Earth system science, climate-resilient shipping, energy infrastructure planning, and climate-related health risks, establishing a new paradigm for AI-enabled climate modelling that accelerates scientific discovery and supports evidence-based adaptation and resilience across Europe.
Nikolay Koldunov | Dmitrii Pantiukhin
The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) is a groundbreaking project aimed at transforming how climate change information is delivered, helping address the complex challenges of a warming world. As part of the EU’s Destination Earth initiative, the Climate DT produces multi-decadal, high-resolution climate projections, updated frequently thanks to the powerful pre-exascale supercomputers of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). By providing globally consistent data on Earth system impacts at km-scales, the Climate DT shortens the traditional 7–10 year climate projection cycles to annual or faster updates. Additionally, it offers tailored simulations to explore “what-if” scenarios, supporting informed decision-making for climate adaptation and advancing the European Green Deal’s goals.
Miguel Andrés-Martínez | Sebastian Beyer | Thomas Jung | Ehsan Mehdipour | Jessica Kegel |Nikolay Koldunov | Dimitry Sidorenko | Jan Streffing | Jan Wehner
More information about this project
Funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, EERIE will reveal and quantify the role of ocean mesoscale processes in shaping the climate trajectory over seasonal to centennial time scales. To this end EERIE will develop a new generation of Earth System Models (ESMs) that are capable of explicitly representing a crucially important, yet unexplored regime of the Earth system – the ocean mesoscale. Leveraging the latest advances in science and technology, EERIE will substantially improve the ability of such ESMs to faithfully represent the centennial-scale evolution of the global climate, especially its variability, extremes and how tipping points may unfold under the influence of the ocean mesoscale.
Jan Gärtner | Rohit Ghosh | Jana Görner | Nora Lawo | Thomas Jung (coordinator) | Nikolay Koldunov | Kacper Nowak
More information about this project
Earth Generator
EarthGenerator will develop a next-generation Foundation Model of the Earth system that extends the capabilities of weather foundation models to represent the coupled atmosphere, ocean, and land across multiple spatial and temporal scales. By training on diverse Earth system observations, reanalyses, simulations, and ancillary datasets using Europe’s exascale HPC infrastructure, the project will create a unified generative AI model capable of forecasting, reconstructing, downscaling, and simulating Earth system processes within a single, physically consistent framework. EarthGenerator will validate the model through applications spanning seasonal-to-multi-year prediction, extreme events, the carbon cycle, food security, and climate-driven migration, while providing standardized interfaces that make advanced Earth system AI accessible to a broad scientific community. Through open collaboration and community engagement, the project aims to establish a foundational AI infrastructure that democratizes Earth system modelling, accelerates scientific discovery, and enables a new generation of climate and environmental applications.
Nikolay Koldunov | Kacper Nowak
The HClimRep project, funded by the Helmholtz Association, aims to transform climate prediction by developing one of the first AI foundation models dedicated to climate research. This advanced model integrates data from the atmosphere, ocean, and sea ice to create one of the world’s most precise weather and climate simulation tools. Trained on Europe’s first exascale computer, HClimRep’s deep learning model, with billions of parameters, will be capable of conducting complex “what-if” experiments, enhancing our understanding of climate dynamics, and providing rapid, accurate projections. This innovation holds the potential to make the impacts of climate change more visible, enabling better strategies to combat and mitigate its effects.
Thomas Jung | Nikolay Koldunov | Kacper Nowak
More information about this project
OceanSOS
OceanSOS is a transdisciplinary Horizon Europe research programme striving to advance European leadership in global efforts to maintain ocean integrity and health in an era of climate change and emerging anthropogenic threats. OceanSOS integrates cutting-edge marine and climate sciences with socio-economic assessments to address emerging high-seas threats. By combining ocean-basin modeling, deep-sea exploration, and international policy expertise, the project establishes scalable frameworks to identify quantitative boundaries for preserving ocean integrity. Ultimately, these seven interconnected workstreams translate robust environmental data into actionable global governance mechanisms and public ocean literacy programs.
WarmWorld
WarmWorld, which receives funding from BMBF, aims to transform Earth system modeling by leveraging advancements in information technology to compute and assess kilometer-scale climate trajectories. Building on an ICON-based storm-and-eddy-resolving Earth System Model (SR-ESM) and its simulation ghost IFS-FESOM), WarmWorld will create innovative workflows to make projected climate trajectory data more accessible and transparent for user communities. In parallel, it will support the harmonization of national and international efforts to provide, share, learn from, and apply the highest quality climate information.
Suvarchal Cheedela | Thomas Jung | Svetlana Loza | Dmitry Sidorenko
More information about this project
The Joint Lab Exascale Earth System Modelling (JL-ExaESM) advances exascale simulations and data handling to achieve breakthroughs in climate change and extreme weather modeling and their societal and ecosystem impacts. By fostering co-design between computer and domain scientists, JL-ExaESM tackles key scientific and methodological challenges in Earth system science, leveraging exascale supercomputing for simulation and data analytics. The initiative integrates modern IT concepts such as flexible scheduling and federated, hierarchical data management to enhance model flexibility and reduce time-to-solution across the entire simulation-data analytics chain. Scientists from nine Helmholtz institutions collaborate in two core areas: Exascale Code Scalability and Exascale Workflow Scalability for Earth system modeling applications.
Suvarchal Cheedela | Thomas Jung | Dmitry Sidorenko
More information about this project
SO-ASE
Our group `Southern Ocean & Antarctic Sea ice Evolution' (SO-ASE) is motivated by the unexpected changes observed in Antarctic sea ice in recent decades, and the need to reduce uncertainty in polar climate projections for the future. We aim to improve understanding of the Antarctic climate, sea ice and ocean system using earth system models and observations. Our foci include high-resolution modelling of interactions between sea ice, ice shelf cavities and icebergs, mean state biases in climate models, and the relationshipe between the Southern Annular Mode and sea ice.
Lettie Roach | Finn Heukamp | Sophia Thomas | Mukulika Pahari | Chloe Boehm
TerraDT is a groundbreaking digital twin project designed to enhance our understanding of how glaciers, sea ice, vegetation, and aerosols influence the Earth’s climate. By delivering high-resolution climate impact assessments, it will provide concrete decision-making tools for local planning, such as helping determine optimal locations for shipping routes, parks, and other infrastructure. The project will leverage Europe's most advanced supercomputers to achieve unprecedented modeling accuracy.
Nikolay Koldunov | Svetlana Loza | Florent Birrien
More information about this project
TRR181 is a DFG funded project about energy transfers in atmosphere and ocean.
The energy of a closed system is steady. It is not lost but rather converted into other forms, such as when kinetic energy is transferred into thermal energy or vice versa heat results in a force.
However, this fundamental principle of natural science is often still a problem for climate research. For example, in case of the calculation of ocean currents, where small-scale vortices as well as mixing processes they induce need to be considered, without fully understanding where the energy for their creation originates from. This is similar in the atmosphere, the only difference being that air is moving instead of water. Again, local turbulences can drive larger movements or vice versa waves on a larger scale can disintegrate into small structures.
All these processes are important for the Earth’s climate and determine how temperatures will rise in the future.
Deniz Aydin | Sergey Danilov | Thomas Jung | Stephan Juricke | Nikolay Koldunov | Martin Losch | Dirk Olbers | Patrick Scholz
