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.