News

13th MESSy Symposium 2025

31st October 2024

We are happy to announce the next MESSy Symposium taking place 24 – 26 June 2025. We are looking forward to welcome you in Oberpfaffenhofen, seeing old and new faces and the research progress of our community.

Registration for participation is open from now until 28 February 2025 via the event website: https://events.hifis.net/e/messy2025

The call for abstracts on the website is open as well. Contributions as oral presentations and poster on recent and ongoing developments and analysis with MESSy are welcome. You can select your preferred type of contribution (orally or poster).

You can find further information on travel and accommodation on the event website.

We look forward to seeing you in June 2025!

New Highlight paper by Ploeger et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

19th February 2024

The authors present a novel mechanism of how regional anomalies in water vapour concentrations in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere impact regional atmospheric circulation systems. These impacts include a displaced upper-level Asian monsoon circulation and strengthened prevailing westerlies in the Pacific region. Current climate models have biases in simulating these regional water vapour anomalies and circulation impacts, but the biases can be avoided by improving the model transport.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-2033-2024

IMPAC²T – a new Young Investigator’s Group at DLR and Helmholtz Munich

5th December 2023

The new Young Investigator’s Group IMPAC²T at DLR and Helmholtz Munich will apply the MECO(n) model system to investigate the impact of air pollution on human health and vegetation, considering climate change and the energy transition in transport. This will help to enable mobility under future climate conditions with the least possible impact on human health and the environment. IMPAC²T is funded by the FONA Initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The Young Investigator’s Group is a collaborative project between the Department of Earth System Modeling for Aeronautics, Space, Transport and Energy of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, under the leadership of Dr. Mariano Mertens, and the working group Environmental Risks of the Institute of Epidemiology of Helmholtz Munich, headed by Dr. Alexandra Schneider. These interdisciplinary teams combine expertise from chemistry-climate modeling with expertise in epidemiology 

Highlight paper in Geoscientific Model Development

9th October 2023

The publication “Emulating lateral gravity wave propagation in a global chemistry–climate model (EMAC v2.55.2) through horizontal flux redistribution” by Roland Eichinger et al. was selected as Higlight paper in the open access journal “Geoscientific Model Development”.

The study presents a computationally efficient method to emulate the effects of lateral propagation of orographic gravity waves (GW) in climate models by horizontal momentum flux redistribution using redistribution maps derived from a GW ray-tracing model. This approach provides an improvement from the purely columnar implementation of gravity wave parameterisations used currently in weather and climate models towards a better representation of orographic GWs in climate models.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-5561-2023

Kick-off for project ADAPTEX

4th April 2023

Kick-off meeting of ADAPTEX took place end of March at DLR in Cologne. Six partners from academia and industry, including the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Universities of Cologne and Aachen, Jülich Supercomputing Center and Hydrotec GmbH are collaborating on this project to improve the accuracy and performance of computational fluid dynamics simulations on supercomputers. The project will focus on the mathematical basis of the discontinuous Galerkin method on dynamically adaptive grids to enable high resolution, computationally efficient modelling of Earth system models. The project addresses applications such as ocean modelling, atmospheric transport processes, and flood simulations, with EMAC as one of its pilot applications. One goal is the development of a dynamical core with an adaptive grid in MESSy.

Introductory workshop at Charles University Prague

28th February 2023

To welcome and support Charles University Prague as one of the newest members of the MESSy consortium, a introductory workshop took place at 8-9 February 2023 at the Department of Atmospheric Physics, Charles University in Prague. The 15 participants from the Czech University consisted of a diverse mix of researchers, from Msc students via early career researchers to senior scientists. Their scientific focus ranges all the way from global dynamics in the middle atmosphere to regional chemistry-climate and air quality studies in Central Europe.

New publication in Nature Communications

13th February 2023

The publication “Variation of lightning-ignited wildfire patterns under climate change” by Francisco J. Pérez-Invernón et al. is now available as open access in Nature Communications. For this study, a recently
developed Long-Continuing-Current (LCC) lightning parameterization has been included in the EMAC model to simulate the sensitivity of lightning and LCC lightning to global change. Globally, a 41% increase of LCC lightning has been simulated, which is slightly lower than the projected increase of total lightning. The results show that lightning schemes including LCC lightning are needed to project the occurrence of lightning-ignited wildfires under climate change.

A summary of the publication is also published in the journal’s “Behind the Paper” section.

New publication on the simulation of isoprene and monoterpenes

6th February 2023

The publication “Isoprene and monoterpene simulations using the chemistry–climate model EMAC (v2.55) with interactive vegetation from LPJ-GUESS (v4.0)” of Vella et al. is now available in the EGU open access journal “Geoscientific Model Development”. Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) are released by vegetation and have a major impact on atmospheric chemistry and aerosol formation. Non-interacting vegetation constrains the majority of numerical models used to estimate global BVOC emissions, and thus, the effects of changing vegetation on emissions are not addressed. In this work, we replace the offline vegetation with dynamic vegetation states by linking a chemistry–climate model with a global dynamic vegetation model.

New publication in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

26th January 2023

The new publication by Flora Kluge et al. on “Airborne glyoxal measurements in the marine and continental atmosphere: comparison with TROPOMI observations and EMAC simulations” is now available in its final version in the EGU open access journal “Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics”. In this study measurements of glyoxal (C₂H₂O₂) in the troposphere are compared to collocated glyoxal measurements of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) and simulations from EMAC.

Recent publication in Atomspheric Chemistry and Physics

12th January 2023

The research article “The effect of ash, water vapor, and heterogeneous chemistry on the evolution of a Pinatubo-size volcanic cloud” by Mohamed Abdelkader et al. has been published in the EGU journal “Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics” as open access. The authors conducted ensemble studies with the ECHAM5/MESSy2 atmospheric chemistry general circulation model (EMAC) on the 1991 Pinatubo volcanic cloud. The experiments include different injection configurations to test the evolution of SO₂, SO₄²⁻, ash masses, stratospheric aerosol optical depth, surface area density, and the stratospheric temperature response against available observations.