Professorship for Physical Geography with a focus on Oceanography
Our group wants to raise awareness for the important role of the ocean and polar regions in the Earth’s system and how they are changing to strengthen efforts to limit human influences on the ocean, ice, and climate. In particular, with our work, we want to understand the essential role of the Southern Ocean, which encircles the Antarctic continent, in mitigating global climate change in the past, present, and future, and how this highly sensitive region of our planet responds to climatic changes.
The Southern Ocean strongly influences the global climate through its interaction with Earth’s carbon, water, and energy budget. This important role arises from the vast exchange of water between the deep ocean and the sea surface that is unprecedented in the global ocean elsewhere. Over past decades, the Southern Ocean has substantially slowed global surface warming by absorbing most of the excess heat in the climate system and a large fraction of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. However, over the past years the Southern Ocean has experienced drastic changes and, to date, it remains uncertain if it will continue to slow down global surface warming in future to the extent that it has been providing such a service in the past.
While climate models make an important contribution to creating reliable information for decision-makers and society, they still do not represent past observed climatic changes in the Southern Ocean region adequately, leading to considerable uncertainties in future projections. In part, these difficulties arise from the inherent challenge to collect observational data in this region and the associated knowledge gap. In our group, we collect and use observational data and deploy numerical models to better understand processes and changes in the Southern Ocean and thus contribute to improving regional and global projections with model simulations.
Prof. Dr. Alexander Haumann
Professorship of Physical Geography with Focus on Oceanography
International Iniatives
Antarctica InSync
Antarctica InSync is a globally coordinated scientific program of UN Ocean Decade that will synchronize research in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and will carry out year-round circumpolar fieldwork missions taking place in the period 2027 to 2029.
Sea Ice Mass Balance Assessment: Southern Ocean (SO-SIMBA)
SO-SIMBA is an ESA-funded collaboration between institutes in Germany, Norway, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom that will develop and validate novel methods and satellite remote sensing products to quantify Antarctic sea ice mass balance.
Towards best practices for Measuring and Archiving Stable Isotopes in Seawater (MASIS)
MASIS is a working groud of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) that seeks to remedy current issues of data collection, quality control, and compilation of stable isotopes in seawater. This effort will permit the full use of stable isotope datasets to track changes in the hydrological and bio-geochemical cycles, as well as in the anthropogenic carbon penetration in the ocean.
Southern Ocean Freshwater Input from Antarctica (SOFIA) Initiative
The SOFIA Initiative aims to improve our understanding of the simulated response to Antarctic freshwater input, and in particular the model uncertainty. The initiative was started by the CliC/CLIVAR/SCAR Southern Ocean Regional Panel, is endorsed as a CLIVAR task team, and has been submitted as a community MIP to CMIP7.
People
Group members
Group Leader
I am a climate scientist fascinated by the ocean, ice, polar regions and the global carbon and water cycles. In particular, I study the impact of changing freshwater fluxes and ice on the Southern Ocean in past, present and future climates and their linkages to global changes at the interface of observations and models.
Postdoc
My aim is to better understand the ocean carbon sink and its changes, with a special focus on the Southern Ocean. I study how the physics of the ocean impact the return pathways of CO2 to the surface, and for this I particularly love using data acquired on sailboats.
Postdoc
I am interested in the large-scale ocean circulation of the Southern Ocean and its impact on heat, freshwater and other physical properties. I am especially interested in understanding the interactions between different length- and time- scales of physical processes that drive ocean patterns and behaviour. In particular, I focus on in situ autonomous measurements from Argo floats.
Research associate / Data manager
With a novel database for marine oxygen isotopes, we want to better understand the role of the Southern Ocean in context of climate change.
PhD Student
PhD student
I am an oceanographer with a passion for the high latitudes. My goal is to use non-hydrostatic models to improve our understanding of convection in the Southern Ocean, with the ultimate aim of improving how Southern Ocean convection is represented in global couple climate models.
Associate members, master's students, and past members
PhD student
I want to understsand the physical controls behind nutrient supply to the South Georgia phytoplankton bloom using high resolution in-situ observations across the ACC.
PhD student
In my PhD, I aim to understand the observable role that Antarctic Winter Water plays in the Southern Ocean. Antarctic Winter Water is important in connecting the polar Southern Ocean to the global ocean.
Master's student (intern)
In my internship, I aim to investigate sea ice-ocean interaction processes in the Southern Ocean using simplified numerical models.
T.B.D.
Publications
Coming soon!