We will open our summer school on “Trends, Rhythms and Events in the Earth’s Climate System – Past, Present and Future” on funded by the VolkswagenFoundation and with support from Springer, MathWorks and Cambridge University Press on Sunday, May 23rd, 2021 with 72 participants and 15 instructors.
The interdisciplinary summer school is designed for doctoral students, aiming (1) to improve their skills to understand the complex interaction of the processes in the Earth’s climate system, (2) to acquire knowledge in state-of-the-art methods of climate time series analysis, (3) to interpret the results of their analysis of past, present and future climate change, including the associated uncertainties, as well as (4) to identify, predict and communicate the impacts of natural and human-caused climate change in an interdisciplinary and intercultural environment.
The two summer schools each comprise three modules with each module covering a week. The first set of Modules 1–3 will focus on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate system, the fundamentals of climate time series analysis and the consideration of uncertainties in climate data. The second set of Modules 4–6 will be about advanced methods of climate time series analysis as well as the impacts of climate change. The cross-thematic Modules 7+8 are about visible traces and effects of climate change as observed in the field and about communicating climate change to non-experts such as decision makers and the public.
Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, this summer school will take place entirely online after similar events in eastern Africa and Germany over the past decade. A summer school campus was created in Gather.town, which mimics the summer schools of earlier years. The campus, actually more of a garden than a house, contains a lecture hall, group work rooms, a summer school café and a poster area. We hope that with Gather we will encourage chance encounters and conversation of participants and instructors, as happened with previous summer schools.
