Max Planck Institute for Meteorology

✨ Research Stay in Japan: An Insight ✨   In November 2025, TRR 181 Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Henning Franke from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology traveled to Japan to strengthen international collaboration on km-scale climate modeling. He participated in a workshop at the University of Tōkyō with global partners, discussing innovative approaches to modeling the ocean and atmosphere. This was followed by a conference in Morioka, where Henning presented his research and gained valuable insights into the latest developments in km-scale climate models.   Beyond the scientific exchanges, Henning experienced Japan's rich culture - from relaxing onsens to culinary delights like Okonomiyaki.   Learn more about his research trip and experiences in Japan in our full report: https://lnkd.in/e5hK5HKX   #Research #ClimateModels #InternationalCollaboration #Japan

🎓 Congratulations to Constanze Reinken on successfully defending her PhD! 👏 In her thesis, “A Stochastic Approach to Modelling Thermokarst Lake Dynamics,” Constanze investigated the behavior of lakes in permafrost regions. She developed a stochastic model based on the karst-like expansion, merging, and drainage of lakes, identifying multiple regimes that correspond to different geographical settings. Her conceptual work provides an important foundation for understanding permafrost lake dynamics. Well done, Constanze! We’re very proud of your achievement and wish you all the best for your next steps. ✨ #PhDDefense #IMPRS #Permafrost

🎉 Last week, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology hosted an inspiring international colloquium on “Vegetation-Climate Interactions”—a special event honoring the 70th birthday of our esteemed former director, Prof. Martin Claussen! 🎂 Organized by his longtime friend and colleague, Victor Brovkin, the colloquium brought together renowned speakers from Germany and abroad, including Sebastian Bathiany, Simona Bordoni, Michele Dinies, Andrey Ganopolski, Philipp Hoelzmann, Julia Pongratz, and Qiong Zhang. 🌿 🏜️ We enjoyed a series of fascinating talks, exploring topics such as the Green Sahara, energetic perspectives on past monsoons, tropical tree cover dynamics, and climate-biosphere modeling—culminating in an engaging presentation by Martin Claussen himself! The colloquium sparked some very interesting discussions and the event concluded with a warm and celebratory gathering, where colleagues shared anecdotes, expressed their deep gratitude for Martin Claussen’s mentorship and scientific leadership and emphasized his lasting impact on the field. 🥂 Thank you to all who participated in making this a truly memorable occasion! ✨

🏆 ICON team wins prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling.👏 What an outstanding achievement! 🤩 Using the ICON Earth system model, a research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum | DKRZ | successfully simulated the Earth system, including atmosphere, ocean, land, and the full carbon cycle, at a horizontal grid spacing of 1.25 km with a throughput sufficient to simulate a decade per month. For this, the ICON team received the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling, awarded by the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery and worth US $10,000 at SC Conference Series 25—the world’s leading conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis—in St. Louis, Missouri. Earlier this week, they had already received the HPCwire Readers' Choice Award. The research team also included experts from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), ETH Zurich, CSCS, the Universität Hamburg, and NVIDIA. We're thrilled, proud, and grateful for this wonderful recognition from the HPC community! Congratulations to all the scientists involved in this landmark project!!! 🎉 🌐 Achieving a resolution of 1.25 kilometers requires evaluating the mathematical equations governing the Earth system for tens of billions of grid cells at every time step—a computationally immense task. ICON, developed for more than 20 years by the ICON partnership, has been adapted for the most advanced supercomputers. In this project, the team exploited the full power of NVIDIA GH200 Superchips on two of Europe’s largest machines—Alps (Switzerland) and #exa_JUPITER (Germany). 🌍 Destination Earth (DestinE)'s climate adaptation digital twin, which is led by CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland and to which MPI-M and DKRZ contribute, was also among the finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. Amazing to see all the outstanding work, and what an honor to be chosen as the winner among all of these fantastic, innovative, and groundbreaking projects! The recognition underscores the strong synergy between climate research and high-performance computing—a relationship that continuously pushes both fields toward new horizons.✨ Read our full press release: https://lnkd.in/eyFW9bnx

🎓 Congratulations to Lucas Carnier Casaroli on successfully defending his #PhD thesis today! 🎉 His dissertation, 🌀“The Role of Tropical Instability Vortices in ENSO-Driven Biogeochemical Variability,”🧪 tackles a fascinating and still underexplored aspect of the tropical Pacific: Tropical Instability Vortices (TIVs) and their influence on the ocean’s carbon and oxygen variability. Using high-resolution coupled physical–biogeochemical #ICON simulations, Lucas explored how variations in TIV intensity shape the variability of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and oxygen (O₂) in the upper ocean, especially under different phases of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). 💡 His findings highlight how essential mesoscale dynamics are for understanding equatorial biogeochemistry variability and show that Earth system models, which cannot explicitly resolve TIVs, may be missing key processes that affect carbon and oxygen distributions. 👏 An impressive contribution to climate and ocean science. All the best for your next steps, Lucas — and congratulations again!

🎉 ICON Team Receives HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award 2025👏 🌐 Using the #ICON Earth system model, a group of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum | DKRZ | has achieved an unprecedented feat by successfully simulating the Earth system, including the atmosphere, ocean, and land, as well as the full carbon cycle, at a horizontal grid-spacing of 1.25 km. This remarkable accomplishment has been recognized as a “Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement” in the 22nd edition of the HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2025 SC Conference Series, in St. Louis, Missouri, US. Congratulations to the whole team, which also includes scientists from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), ETH Zürich, CSCS, Universität Hamburg, and NVIDIA. !! 🎊 🏆 “This award testifies to the powerful synergy between science and technology and to exceptional team work. I am delighted and grateful to the HPCwire community for this wonderful recognition,” said MPI-M researcher Daniel Klocke, who led the project. 🧮 To achieve this landmark simulation, the team harnessed the full power of the GH200 Superchips on the two largest supercomputers in Europe: Alps in Switzerland and #exa_JUPITER in Germany. The unprecedented time compression of 145.7 simulated days per day was achieved while using 85% of JUPITER’s computing resources. It was possible because of the way ICON used NVIDIA Grace CPUs and Hopper GPUs to carefully balance Earth’s components in a heterogeneous setup, and by utilizing novel methods for data centric optimization, which, at the same time, enabled a particularly energy-efficient simulation. 💧🌤️🌿 The simulation allows researchers to resolve links between the carbon, energy, and water cycles, and how their interactions shape the Earth system. It was also nominated for the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling, which will be awarded at the same conference in just a few days!! 🤞 👉 HPCwire is a news site and weekly newsletter covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. The coveted annual HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors, and revealed each year to kick of the annual supercomputing conference. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/egERjFAv 📸 The group picture shows Miguel Gila, Andreas Herten, Claudia Frauen, Daniel Klocke, Jan Frederik Engels, Mathis Bode, and Torsten Hoefler 🇨🇭 with their award certificate at the SC25 conference!

🌿 PhD Defense of Arim Yoon 🌿 🎓 Yesterday, Arim Yoon successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “Human-induced Threats to the Stability of the Amazon Rainforest.” Congratulations! 👏 In her research, she investigated how precipitation and extreme events respond to deforestation and global warming, using the global storm-resolving model #ICON. Her findings show that explicitly resolving convection makes mean Amazonian precipitation more stable to these forcings, but also reveal that extreme events pose a threat to the rainforest under increasing deforestation. During her PhD, Arim didn’t just model the Amazon, she experienced it firsthand by visiting the #ATTO project in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. We’re incredibly proud of her achievements and wish her all the best in her future endeavors! 🌎 #WeatherExtremes #Amazon #Deforestation #PhD

❓ How can model experiments on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation be made more realistic?❓ 🌀 Melting ice in the Arctic is causing an increasing amount of freshwater to enter the North Atlantic, which is expected to result in a weakening of the Atlantic overturning circulation. However, many modeling studies make unrealistic assumptions about how this water enters the ocean. 🌊 A new study by Fraser Goldsworth of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology highlights the limitations of previous experiments and ways to make them more realistic in the future. He applied a novel framework that tracks the transformation of freshwater masses based on the conservation of total salt content to high-resolution #ICON simulations and showed that the timing, location, and source of freshwater input can have a considerable impact on its eventual fate and should therefore be taken into account in future model experiments. 📖 Read the original publication here: https://lnkd.in/ezQ_7w9c 🗺️ The map shows salinity in the North Atlantic, as simulated with the ICON model. Credit: EERIE I European Eddy-Rich Earth System Models/MPI-M

🎉 Happy 70th Birthday to Prof. Dr. Martin Claussen! The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology warmly celebrates its former director, a visionary in climate science and a true pioneer in Earth system research. 🌿 Martin Claussen’s groundbreaking work on climate-vegetation interactions contributed to the development of comprehensive Earth system models—he was the first to successfully couple a #ClimateModel with a #VegetationZoneModel! This was a true breakthrough that enabled the simulation of past climate states, such as the greening of the Sahara during the mid-Holocene, a topic that has remained his research focus also after his retirement. 🎓 Since the beginning of his scientific career, Martin Claussen has been committed to promoting Hamburg as a center for climate research. As a mentor, university professor at Universität Hamburg, and head of the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modelling (2018–2023), Claussen was involved in training young scientists, nurturing scientific excellence. 📖 To mark the occasion, the #MPIM has invited around 50 guests to a scientific symposium, which will take place on November 14. The event, which was organized by Claussen’s long-time colleague, MPI-M group leader Victor Brovkin, will focus on the role of vegetation-climate interactions in climate dynamics, with a particular emphasis on Saharan greening. Colleagues, former students, and collaborators will gather to reflect on Martin Claussen’s enduring impact.

Is tropical rain belt variability driven by self-organization of clouds? ⛅️ We're proud to welcome Dr. Tomoro Yanase to #MPIM to investigate this question, together with MPI-M group leader Cathy Hohenegger. 🌅 To start off, they will run idealized simulations with the SCALE model to probe how horizontal SST patterns affect the self-organization of clouds. Following on, their collaboration will expand into more realistic simulations with #ICON and potentially using observations from the #ORCESTRA field campaign. Using those data they will explore if the behavior of self-organization found in their idealized simulations can explain variability in cloudiness across the ITCZ 🌧️🌊🌍 A fascinating project for sure! We look forward to their findings! Meanwhile, Dr. Yanase is already growing accustomed to life in Hamburg. He’s tried Fischbrötchen 🍔—“Not bad”, even “good”—and, as he is a keen runner, he’s started running around the Alster. 🏃🏻 Perhaps by the end of his stay he’ll be running around the whole lake 💪 Dr. Yanase’s research stay with us is supported by funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and will last for one year from October 2025 🙌