Archive

We contributed two posters to the WCRP Open Science Conference held in Kigali, Rwanda, and online. There, we presented the development of agricultural indices in Africa under different emission scenarios (Abel et al. 2023a).

We have published a new paper entitled "Projected changes in rainfall amount and distribution in the Democratic Republic of Congo – Evidence from an ensemble of high-resolution climate simulations" in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes.

At the end of the exhibition "Water Change" in the Weltladen Würzburg, Dr. Daniel Abel was invited as a speaker to present the change in water availability as a consequence of climate change. The talk entitled "Water change - global, regional and local perspective" highlighted the occurrence of droughts and heavy precipitation in the past and - assuming different greenhouse gas scenarios - in the future.

We have published a new paper entitled "Climate change information tailored to agriculture and forestry in Central Europe, exemplified on the region of Lower Franconia" (Paeth et al. 2023) in the journal Climatic Change. In the paper, various indicators relevant to agriculture and forestry were investigated, such as the occurrence of late frosts, heat days, dry periods and heavy precipitation.

In the journal Ecology and Evolution, we addressed the question of how to determine the spatial distribution of insects based on bioclimatic variables in a Mediterranean region extended to the north.

In the WASCAL WRAP2.0 project LANDSURF we published the paper "Robustness of climate indices relevant for agriculture in Africa deduced from GCMs and RCMs against reanalysis and gridded observations" (Abel et al. 2023) in the journal Climate Dynamics. The question of how well climate models are able to reproduce agricultural indices goes hand in hand with a number of preconditions such as the adequate simulation of the rainy season.

Our new publication in Science of The Total Environment addresses the question of how climate change affects food security in large parts of tropical and subtropical Africa. Based on statistical and physical models, it was shown that in the past, using West Africa as an example, up to 51% of the variability of maize harvests was determined by climatic constraints. As a consequence, assuming the emission scenario RCP8.5, a decrease of maize production by 20 % until the end of the century has to be expected.

As part of the project "Climate Experience Würzburg", we have published a new paper (Hartmann et al. 2023) in collaboration with the TU Munich, which deals with the effect of the urban heat island during the years 2018-2020 in Würzburg. We were able to show that the urban heat island is most pronounced on days with more than 25 °C and in the afternoon and evening hours. The highest temperature difference compared to the surrounding areas was 8.2 °C. Resulting drought stress of urban trees significantly reduces their cooling effect.

At the 103rd meeting of the American Meteorological Society, the current work from the WASCAL WRAP2.0 project LANDSURF was presented.