Congratulations!Louisa Bell successfully defended her doctoral thesis

16 October 2024

Photo: David Grawe

We are proud to announce the successful disputation of our SICSS member Louisa Bell.

Her dissertation “Analysis and evaluation of cold season characteristics and their future development: A case study for the region of Hamburg” was supervised by Dr. Kevin Sieck (GERICS) and Prof. Dr. K. Heinke Schlünzen (Meteorological Institute, UHH).

In order to gain a deeper understanding of the cold season in the Hamburg region, Louisa analysed a range of climate indices, including frost and ice days, as well as wet and heavy precipitation days. A particular emphasis was placed on prolonged cold events, which she defined as ice episodes. She compared the results of regional climate model data with observational datasets, included different uncertainty measures and considered the situation at the end of this century (2100). Furthermore, she identified representative atmospheric circulation patterns during ice episodes in Hamburg and developed a method to re-identify those patterns in regional climate model data. This allows investigation of whether there will still be an association between identified patterns and ice episodes in Hamburg under global warming. One key finding from her analysis is that, even under the high emission scenario RCP8.5, all regional climate models considered in her work project the occurrence of at least one ice episode at the end of this century (within 2065-2095).

Louisa was a member of HICSS (Helmholtz-Institute for Climate Service Science), a cooperation between Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) and Universität Hamburg (UHH). She spent half of her week at GERICS and the other half at the Meteorological Institute of UHH.

Her future plans?
Louisa has already started her new job at GERICS. Her role will be to work on an interface between climate model data and a newly developed web platform. She is particularly interested in supporting the transition from knowledge to action.