The Wegener Center at University of Graz (UNIGRAZ) is an interdisciplinary research centre in the fields of climate and global change monitoring, analysis, projections, impacts, and policy. The UNIGRAZ team led the work package responsible for the interface between climate models and climate impact studies in the EU FP6 project CLAVIER (Climate Change and Variability: Impact on Central and Eastern Europe, www.clavier-eu.org), is responsible for high-resolution downscaling of climate scenarios for hydrological and further impact studies, and for uncertainty estimation in the EU FP7 project ACQWA (Assessing Climate impacts on the Quantity and quality of Water, www.acqwa.ch), contributes in a leading role to Austria’s major projects in the field of regional climate modeling and downscaling, and contributes to several interdisciplinary projects in the field of regional climate change impacts (sectors: energy supply, energy demand, agriculture, water supply, tourism, natural hazards).
UNIGRAZ contributes to ARANGE in two fields: Firstly, in the estimation of future climate conditions with relevance to forests in the case study regions (including an estimate of their reliability/uncertainty). Secondly, UNIGRAZ contributes in the preparation of tailored climate scenarios. This includes the selection of representative scenarios, the downscaling to the local conditions of the case study regions, and the correction of climate model errors, in order to provide tailored climatic data for the forest models of ARANGE.
Persons involved:
Andreas Gobiet
vice-director of the Wegener Center / Univ. Graz and head of its Regional and Local Climate Modelling and Analysis (ReLoClim) research group. He works in the field of regional climate modelling, downscaling, interfaces between climate models and climate change impact research, and uncertainty estimation since 2003, leads and contributes (together with his team) to several national projects in that field, and is responsible for climate model – climate change impact interfaces and user tailored climate scenarios in the EU projects CLAVIER (FP6), ACQWA (FP7), and ARNICA (CIRCLE).
M. Themeßl
is scientist in the ReLoClim Research Group. He studied environmental system sciences with emphasis on physical geography and works on statistical downscaling and error correction of regional climate models since 2004.
G. Heinrich
is scientist in the ReLoClim research group. He works on uncertainty assessment of regional climate scenarios since 2008 in his PhD thesis.
