Dr. Stephan Thober

Leader HydroScientific Software Development group

Computational Hydrosystems (CHS)
Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research - UFZ
Permoserstr. 15
04318 Leipzig


Fon: 0341 235 482324
Fax: 0341 235 1939

Stephan Thober

My work

Currently, I am a group leader of the HydroScientific Development (HSD) group the HSD group. In this group, we maintain and further develop the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM) and associated tools. I am currently also a visiting scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) and serve as work package leader and service manager in the Ulysses project funded by the European Copernicus Climate Change program.

Further, I am interested in the representation of hydrologic processes within hydrologic and land-surface models, in particular their parametrization. I evaluate a multiscale Parameter Regionalization technique (MPR), presented first for the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM), inside the state-of-the-art land-surface models.

In the past, I lead the HOKLIM project, which investigated high-resolution climate projection for Europe with a focus on different levels of global warming (i.e., 1.5° K, 2° K, and 3 °K).

In my PhD thesis, I worked on the statistical downscaling of meteorological variables (i.e. precipitation and temperature) from climate models to hydrological models. The goal is to generate synthetic high-resolution fields that have the same statistical properties as observations.


Career

2019-present Group leader Hydro-Scientific Software Development, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ
2017-2018 Project leader, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ
2015-2017 Postdoc, EDgE - End-to-end Demonstrator for improved decision making in the water sector in Europe: responsible for the application of Noah-MP and pre-processing of meteorological data including downscaling of seasonal forecasts and climate projections
2011-2015 PhD student, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ and Friedrich Schiller University of Jena

Education

2016 PhD, Geosciences, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany
2010 Diploma, Mathematics, University Greifswald, Germany

Funding

2023-present Calibration of ECLand at multiple sites using MPR technology (PI, 150k€)
2022-present DestinE climate adaptation Digital Twin, own contribution: implementation of a hydrologic model to calculate streamflow (WP leader, 780k€ out of 13M€)
2022-present Copernicus Climate Change Service contract: Multi-model Operational Hydrological Seasonal Prediction Service – Global Scale (PI, 340k€)
2021-present MetaMoSim: Development of tools for creating reproducible simulations on High-Performance Compute Clusters that provide FAIR data. (PI, 200k€ out of 400k€)
completed
2019-2021 Ulysses: The development of a global seasonal hydrologic multi-model forecasting system. (service manager and WP leader, ~300k€)
2017-2018 HOKLIM: High-resolution Climate Indicators
for 1.5 Degree Global Warming (PI, ~260k€)

Publications

Research Gate

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2023 (7)

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2022 (9)

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2021 (4)

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Journal Referee

Geophysical Research Letters (AGU), Water Resources Research (AGU), Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (EGU), Journal of Hydrometeorology (AMS)