News Archive

2022

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)

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.

Jul 22, 2021

We are happy to announce the next release of mHM: v5.11.2 .

May 19, 2021

In October 2020 a new Helmholtz Young Investigator group ( link ) led by Jakob Zscheischler started in CHS. The group will work on compound weather and climate events with a particular focus on using novel ideas from explainable machine learning to identify compounding weather drivers of extreme impacts such as vegetation mortality, crop failure and floods. Recently the group was awarded a Helmholtz AI project called CausalFlood, in which compounding drivers of floods will be identified based on causal inference in collaboration with the group of Jakob Runge from DLR.

Apr 15, 2021

We are happy to announce the release of the massive update v1.3.0 of GSTools.

Feb 23, 2021

Dr. Luis Samaniego defended his Habilitation work on the 23^rd February at the Faculty of Science at the University of Potsdam. The topic of his Habilitation was: "DROUGHT MODELING AND FORECASTING - from Local to Global Scales -”. The commission unanimously conferred him the *venia legendi* in hydrology.

Feb 11, 2021

A preprint of the article "Data Driven High Resolution Modeling and Spatial Analyses of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany" by Schüler et al. is now available.

Feb 4, 2021

Press release Shorter but more intense - Changes in the European droughts

2020

Dec 9, 2020

New paper on "Strong hydroclimatic controls on vulnerability to subsurface nitrate contamination across Europe" by Kumar et al., published in Nature Communications

Nov 12, 2020

Starting next year, two Helmholtz knowledge transfer projects will be funded at the UFZ. The Water Resources Information System Germany WIS-D ( see here ) lead in CHS and the forest monitor headed in the Department CLE.

Nov 8, 2020

FALLING WALLS CIRCLE TABLE: BREAKTHROUGHS IN WATER DIAGNOSIS
with A. CURRY, J. MCDONNELL, J. ROSE, L. SAMANIEGO

Three international experts working on Water Diagnosis methods meet at the World Science Summit (last Nov. 8) to discuss insights of past achievements and the next walls that need to be torn-down to improve water management.

2019

Dec 20, 2019

Rakovec et al. (2019): "Diagnostic Evaluation of Large‐Domain Hydrologic Models Calibrated Across the Contiguous United States", Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

Dec 1, 2019

Samaniego et al. (2019): "Hydrological Forecasts and Projections for Improved Decision-Making in the Water Sector in Europe", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Jun 5, 2019

Release of mHM 5.10

2018

Our group contributed to the IPCC report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C with three contributions from the HOKLIM and EDgE projects.

Jun 1, 2018

Jing, M. et al. (2018): "Improved regional-scale groundwater representation by the coupling of the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM v5.7) to the groundwater model OpenGeoSys (OGS)", Geosci. Model Dev.

May 3, 2018

WRR Editors’ Highlight: Zink et al. 2018: "Conditioning a Hydrologic Model Using Patterns of Remotely Sensed Land Surface Temperature"

Apr 23, 2018

Samaniego et al. (2018): "Anthropogenic warming exacerbates European soil moisture droughts", Nature Climate Change Zeile nach oben verschieben

Mar 24, 2018

Zink, M. (2018): "Conditioning a hydrologic model using patterns of remotely sensed land surface temperature", Water Resour. Res.

Jan 3, 2018

Thober et al. (2018): "Multi-model ensemble projections of European river floods and high flows at 1.5, 2, and 3 degree global warming", ERL

2017

2015

Aug 12, 2015

Dürrer wird's noch (ZEIT online) feat. the UFZ Drought Monitor and M. Zink

Drought in Germany, Aug 2015, ZEIT online

Jun 25, 2015

Zech et al. (2015), "Sauna, sweat and science", Isotopes in Environm. and Health Studie

Climate Tower inauguration (MDR.de) lead by C. Rebmann and M. Cuntz

Inauguration of the Climate Tower in Hohes Holz

May 26, 2015

Eos Research Spotlight Inflexibility of Some Hydrological Models Limits Accuracy feat. Mendoza et al. 2015

Feb 6, 2015

HEPEX Blog The importance of parameterizations for better continental forecast systems by Luis Samaniego

2013

Mar 26, 2013

Does parameterization technique affect simulations of water fluxes? selected for the Eos Research Spotlight in AGU's weekly newspaper.
Featured article

Feb 1, 2013

Nationwide agricultural drought reconstruction for Germany since 1950 at a spatial resolution of 4×4 km².
Journal article

2010

May 22, 2010

WRR-Editor's Choice Awards 2010: Multiscale parameter regionalization of a grid-based hydrologic model at the mesoscale.

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 6025-2367

Sindy Bleiholder
Phone +49 341 6025-1250

Susanne Gangloff
Phone +49 341 6025-2533

sekces@ufz.de

Permoserstraße 15 | 04318 Leipzig

News / Press

July 30, 2023

Hitze und Dürre - Interview with climate researcher Jakob Zscheischler
in Deutschlandfunk (only in German, 10:50 min) Link to interview

May 16, 2023

Start of ESA funded project 4DHydro

The overarching objective of 4DHydro is to foster collaborations between the Earth Observation (EO) water cycle community developing novel high-resolution EO data products, and the land surface and hydrological modelling community (LSM/HM) engaged in advancing hyperresolution modelling of the hydrological cycle at regional and continental scales. By involving several European institutions 4DHydro will assess and improve data sets of EO as well as synchronize EO products and LSM/HM models in order to improve predictions of the hydrological system. Overall, it will assist end-users and decisions-makers as well as the EU Destination Earth initiative. The project’s kick-off meeting will take place in Leipzig on 21st of June 2023.

Jan 30, 2023

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The following paper received the ASCE-EWRI 2023 Award for Best Case Study in the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering.

Mai, J. , B. A. Tolson, H. Shen, É. Gaborit, V. Fortin, N. Gasset, H. Awoye, T. A. Stadnyk, L. M. Fry, E. A. Bradley, F. Seglenieks, A. G. Temgoua, D. G. Princz, S. Gharari, A. Haghnegahdar, M. E. Elshamy, S. Razavi, M. Gauch, J. Lin, X. Ni, Y. Yuan, M. McLeod, N. B. Basu, R. Kumar, O. Rakovec, L. Samaniego, S. Attinger, N. K. Shrestha, P. Daggupati, T. Roy, S. Wi, T. Hunter, J. R. Craig, and A. Pietroniro (2021):
The Great Lakes Runoff Intercomparison Project Phase 3: Lake Erie (GRIP-E)
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, 26(9), 05021020. Accepted Feb 16, 2021.

https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%29HE.1943-5584.0002097

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.

Older news are stored in the news archive.

New publications

Henniger, H., Huth, A., Frank, K., & Bohn, F. J. (2023). Creating virtual forests around the globe and analysing their state space. Ecological Modelling, 483, 110404. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2023.110404

In this paper we present the "Forest Factory 2.0″ algorithm, which generates various virtual forest stands for different biomes on Earth. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, we analyse different forest-structure->ecosystem-function relationships across biomes.
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

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.