Heat waves in Berlin, Germany - Urban climate modifications

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dieter Scherer
• Subject Area: Physical Geography
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322579844

The project "Urban climate modifications" is one of three projects that is proposed as project entitled "Heat waves in Berlin, Germany". The project shall study occurrence and characteristics of heat waves in Berlin and their negative impacts on human health, in collaboration with the research partners Eva Müller and Gerd Wessolek (Technische Universität Berlin) who propose the project "Water stress for urban trees", and with Sebastian Schubert (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) who intends to develop an improved method for dynamical downscaling of global climate projections for cities to be tested for the example of Berlin in his project "Climate projections". The DFG research unit 1736 "Urban Climate and Heat Stress in mid-latitude cities in view of climate change (UCaHS)", funded till mid of 2016, could e.g. reveal that in the first decade of the 21st century several episodes of above-average warm weather conditions occurred in each year that are statistically highly correlated with increased mortality of Berlin's population. In this project, we shall investigate, how the risk-based approach developed in UCaHS could be further improved and used for identification of heat waves. The heat waves identified by this approach shall then be studied with respect to differences in meteorological conditions between heat waves, how these relate to antecedent meteorological conditions, and how urban structures and trees cause intra-urban differences. Joint research shall target on studying the influence of water stress on climate-regulatory ecosystem services by transpirative cooling and shading using a multi-scale approach. In addition, differences between urban and rural areas shall be analysed. The comprehensive data sets from the Urban Climate Observation Network and from the German Weather Service, from further observations (incl. eddy-covariance measurements), as well as the gridded data of the Central Europe Refined analysis (CER) shall be complemented, updated and analysed with respect to the above-mentioned research topics. This includes development and testing of methods for spatial aggregation of meteorological and human-biometeorological data for individual city districts and areas in the surroundings, such that comprehensive, spatially distributed risk data could be analysed with respect to spatial differences in hazards caused by heat waves. In this context, joint research shall quantify uncertainties in climate projections with high spatial resolution, and study how they influence identification and analysis of heat waves under future climate conditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants