Robert Schweppe

Hydrowissenschaftliche Software Entwicklung (HSD)

Helmholtz Centre
for Environmental Research − UFZ
Permoserstr. 15
04318 Leipzig, Germany

phone: ++49 - 341 - 235 1784

robert.schweppe@ufz.de

Simucrop

Climate changes leads to drastic changes in the environment. Agriculture faces increasing weather related risks such as droughts. Modern insurance policies can help avert the worst consequences. Those policies are powered by new technology. They are informed by latest scientific insights. They leverage big data to flexibly estimate individual risks.

We have a decade long record of hydrologic modelling. Our expertise opens up more precise ways to estimate the plant available water at the root zone than currently used in the insurance sector. We initiated the Simucrop project to explore avenues how we can provide added value to clients and partners.

Personal expertise

hydrologic modelling with mHM, HTESSEL, LARSIM and others
development of supplementary software tools like MPR and in-house Python and Fortran libraries
experience in academia and private engineering sector

Short CV

Work Experience

since 07/2017

Researcher at the Department of Computational Hydrosystems at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany

01/2014 – 06/2017

Project engineer at HYDRON GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany

04/2013 – 10/2013

Student Research Assistant at the Department of Computational Landscape Ecology at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany

07/2007 – 06/2010 &

10/2011 – 04/2012

Student Research Assistant at the Troposheric Aerosols working group at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, Leipzig, Germany

Education

10/2011 – 12/2013

Master of Science "Management of Natural Resources", Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Master's thesis: “Assessing the impact of HRU aggregation schemes on model performance in SWAT”

10/2007 – 07/2010

Bachelor of Science "Geography", University of Leipzig, Bachelor's thesis: "Characterization and source analysis of atmospheric aerosol particles at ZOTTO, Siberia"

Awards

10/2012 – 10/2013

01-2022 - 03-2022

scholarship holder of the private-public Deutschlandstipendium

fellowship holder of the Helmholtz Field Study Fellowship programme

Publications

Feigl, M., Thober, S., Schweppe, R., Herrnegger, M., Samaniego, L., and Schulz, K.: Automatic regionalization of model parameters for hydrological models, Wat. Res. Res., (submitted).

Schweppe, R., Thober, S., Müller, S., Kelbling, M., Kumar, R., Attinger, S.,
and Samaniego, L.: MPR 1.0: a stand-alone multiscale parameter regionalization tool
for improved parameter estimation of land surface models, Geosci. Model Dev., 15, 1–24
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-1-2022, 2022.

Heintzenberg, J., Birmili, W., Otto, R., Andreae, M. O., Mayer, J.-C., Chi, X., and Panov, A.: Aerosol particle number size distributions and particulate light absorption at the ZOTTO tall tower (Siberia), 2006–2009, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 8703-8719, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-11-8703-2011, 2011.

Contact

Head
Prof. Dr. Sabine Attinger
Department of Computational Hydrosystems
tbl-modmon@ufz.de

Deputy Head
Prof. Dr. Luis Samaniego
Department of Computational Hydrosystems
luis.samaniego@ufz.de

Assistance
Nora Pabst
Phone +49 341 235-1281

Sindy Bleiholder
Phone +49 341 235-1250

Susanne Kühn
Phone +49 341 235-482533

sekces@ufz.de

Permoserstraße 15 | 04318 Leipzig

News / Press

Dec 1, 2022

Award Poster Masooma Batool

Masooma Batool won the "Best student poster award" at the XXI International Nitrogen Workshop.
This conference, hosted by ETSIAAB, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, brought together nearly 300 papers from authors from 40 countries in Madrid, Spain, October 24-28, 2022.
At the conference, Masooma and her colleagues presented long-term trends in soil nitrogen (N) surplus across Europe (1850-2019). Excess N provides information on the trends and spatial distribution of N surplus in soil systems across Europe, highlighting agricultural areas in Central Europe as nitrogen hotspots. These areas have undergone dramatic changes over the past 150 years. Importantly, we show that estimates of N surplus are subject to large uncertainties, requiring explicit consideration of these uncertainties when analyzing past trends in N surplus.

Nov 15, 2022

Earthrise - Mission Klima
How our research contributes to climate mitigation and adaptation is demonstrated in this WELT report.

Video at www.welt.de (only in German)

05:50': Hohes Holz research station
10:40': FORMIND in the Vislab
15:45': Fragmentation of forests
43:00': FORMIND and climate scenarios

Oct 12, 2022

Dr. Husain Najafi won the UFZ Young Scientist Award for Applied Research 2022. The award goes to him for his excellence and dedication in development of the operational drought forecasting system in Germany and investigation of 2021 summer flood predictability. Hydrological forecasting systems are the fundamental component of early warning systems - disaster risk reduction.

Sep 2, 2022

The collaborative project "Standardisiertes Monitoring von Wachstumsreaktionen wichtiger Waldbaumarten auf klimatische Extremereignisse" (MW³) with participation of the UFZ will develop a standardized monitoring system and protocol to record growth responses of important Central European forest tree species with a focus on climatic extremes. Future extreme events and their impact on forest carbon fluxes in Germany will be analyzed using smart models.

May 16, 2022

Interview with Dr. F. J. Bohn in the Dlf Audiothek | Umwelt und Verbraucher | "Agrarminister-Sonderkonferenz: Am Waldumbau führt kein Weg vorbei"

Link to interview (only in German)

Aug 20, 2021

Open house days of the Swabian MOSES Campaign received large public interest. A research consortium of several Helmholtz centers, universities and the German Weather Service, investigates the cause and effects of hydro-meteorological extremes such as heavy thunderstorms, high precipitation and floods as well as heatwaves and droughts. The MOSES initiative is coordinated by the UFZ.

Aug 17, 2021

Start of the third phase of Collaborative Research Centre AquaDiva, investigating the links between surface and subsurface signals in the earth critical zone. Two projects are lead by researchers of CHS. They will investigate with modeling and observations how temporal and spatial variation of surface input and processes during subsurface transit drive the water flow and element transport to groundwater and rivers.

Older news are stored in the news archive.

New publications

Friedrich Boeing, Oldrich Rakovec, Rohini Kumar, Luis Samaniego, Martin Schrön, Anke Hildebrandt, Corinna Rebmann, Stephan Thober, Sebastian Müller, Steffen Zacharias, Heye Bogena, Katrin Schneider, Ralf Kiese, Sabine Attinger, and Andreas Marx. High-resolution drought simulations and comparison to soil moisture observations in Germany. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 26, 5137–5161, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-5137-2022

In this paper, we deliver an evaluation of the second generation operational German drought monitor ( https://www.ufz.de/duerremonitor ) with a state-of-the-art compilation of observed soil moisture data from 40 locations and four different measurement methods in Germany. We show that the expressed stakeholder needs for higher resolution drought information at the one-kilometer scale can be met and that the agreement of simulated and observed soil moisture dynamics can be moderately improved.
Mahnken, M., Cailleret, M., Collalti, A., Trotta, C., Biondo, C., D’Andrea, E., ... & Reyer, C. P. O. (2022). Accuracy, realism and general applicability of European forest models. Global Change Biology. DOI: 10.1111/gcb.16384
Pacheco-Labrador, J., Weber, U., Ma, X., Mahecha, M. D., Carvalhais, N., Wirth, C., Huth, A., Bohn, F. J., Kraemer, G., Heiden, U., FunDivEUROPE members, and Migliavacca, M.: EVALUATING THE POTENTIAL OF DESIS TO INFER PLANT TAXONOMICAL AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITIES IN EUROPEAN FORESTS, Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., XLVI-1/W1-2021, 49–55, 2022. DOI: 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVI-1-W1-2021-49-2022
Bevacqua, E., De Michele, C., Manning, C., Couasnon, A., Ribeiro, A.F.S., Ramos, A.M., Vignotto, E., Bastos, A., Blesić, S., Durante, F., Hillier, J., Oliveira, S.C., Pinto, J.G., Ragno, E., Rivoire, P., Saunders, K., van der Wiel, K., Wu, W., Zhang, T., Zscheischler, J. (2021): Guidelines for Studying Diverse Types of Compound Weather and Climate Events. Earth Future. 10.1029/2021EF002340
Najafi H, Robertson AW, Massah Bavani AR, Irannejad P, Wanders N, Wood EF. Improved multi-model ensemble forecasts of Iran's precipitation and temperature using a hybrid dynamical-statistical approach during fall and winter seasons. Int
J Climatol. 2021;1–28. DOI: 10.1002/joc.7148

Hari, V., Rakovec, O., Markonis, Y. et al. Increased future occurrences of the exceptional 2018–2019 Central European drought under global warming. Sci Rep 10, 12207 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-68872-9

Schmidt, L., Heße, F., Attinger, S., Kumar, R., (2020): "Challenges in applying machine learning models for hydrological inference: A case study for flooding events across Germany", Water Resources Research DOI: 10.1029/2019WR025924

Jing, M., Kumar, R., Heße, F., Thober, S., Rakovec, O., Samaniego, L., Attinger, S., (2020): "Assessing the response of groundwater quantity and travel time distribution to 1.5, 2, and 3 °C global warming in a mesoscale central German basin", Hydrology and Earth System Sciences DOI: 10.5194/hess-24-1511-2020