How do atmospheric river-induced hydrological extremes drive Earth surface changes?

Tobias is currently an ESA Living Planet Fellow at the Institute for Earth System Science and Remote Sensing at Leipzig University (Germany). In his research, he employs and further develops methods from complexity science to understand past and present Earth system dynamics with a focus on climate extremes.
He graduated with a Master’s degree in Physics from University of Duisburg-Essen in 2018. He carried out his PhD project at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) between 2019-2022. The project was concerned with Info Sheet developing nonlinear time series analysis methods based on recurrence plots and identifying significant transitions in palaeoclimate proxy records along with their societal repercussions. In 2022, Tobias developed a strong interest in the study of atmospheric rivers during a short postdoctoral position in the ClimXtreme project at PIK. He further strengthened his strongly interdisciplinary research during two short-term postdoctoral research stays at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam in 2023.

Research objectives

The ARNETLAB project analyses the complex interplay between atmospheric rivers (AR), hydrological extremes and ecosystem impacts using a multi-layer network approach:

• Develop a robust transport network framework for global AR trajectories based on available AR catalogs (including the global PIKART catalog (https://ar.pikpotsdam.de))
• Explore potentials for enhancing the predictability of hydrological extremes using adaptive networks and graph neural networks
• Extract global synchronization patterns between AR landfall and heavy precipitation events
• Investigate impacts of AR-driven heavy precipitation events on land-surface hydrology and vegetation dynamics, using multiple ESA data streams as they are curated in the Deep Earth System Data Lab (DeepESDL).