Assessing Climate impacts on the Quantity and quality of WAter

WegCenter’s contribution to the proposed project ACQWA predominantly consists of high-resolution downscaling regional climate model results to appropriate scales for driving hydrological and further models. This task will be conducted by the Regional and Local Climate Modelling and Analysis (ReLoClim) Research Group of WegCenter led by A. Gobiet. The ReLoClim group leads the work package responsible for high-resolution downscaling and, more general, 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), contributes to Austria’s major project in the field of regional climate modelling and downscaling (reclip:more) in a leading role, conducts several further national projects in the field of regional climate change, and builds on experience of the group members in regional climate modelling and downscaling (dynamical and statistical), climate data analysis, and interdisciplinary studies regarding climate change impacts on water supply, agriculture, and energy production and demand since 2003.

Dr. Andreas Gobiet studied physics and environmental system sciences at UniGraz, Austria. He can build on a strong interdisciplinary experience gained during his M.Sc. (graduation 2001) and Ph.D. (graduation 2005) theses covering topics like atmospheric chemistry and air pollution, local flow systems, ground- and space-borne atmospheric remote sensing, data assimilation, and model evaluation. Since 2003, he works in the field of regional climate modelling with focus on high resolution climate modelling and downscaling in the Alpine region. He gained management and teaching experience since the start of his M.Sc. thesis where he was involved in project management and teaching from the beginning, leads several national projects in the field of regional climate change and high resolution climate modelling, WegCenter’s contribution the above mentioned projects reclip:more and CLAVIER and is head of WegCenter’s ReLoClim Research Group since 2005.

Mag. Heimo Truhetz studied technical physics and environmental system sciences with emphasis on physics at the technical Univ. of Graz and UniGraz. He graduated to M.Sc. in 2000 and is involved in environmental modelling since 2001, since 2002 with focus on regional climate modelling in general and microscale downscaling of the near surface wind. Since 2005 he is member of the ReLoClim research group at WegCenter where he also gained experience and expertise on high performance computing facilities such as ECMWF’s massively parallel computing systems and currently conducts very-high resolution dynamical downscaling experiments in the EU project CLAVIER. His graduation to PhD level is expected in early 2008.

Mag. Matthias Themessl studied geography and environmental system sciences at UniGraz, Austria (M.Sc. graduation 2005) and is experienced in statistical downscaling and analysis of climate data with special emphasis on variance analysis. In his master’s thesis he optimized the canonical correlation analysis approach applied to downscaling of regional climate model results and currently focuses in his PhD thesis on statistical downscaling techniques for extremes and small-scale phenomena.