Jakob Zscheischler

Weather and climate models

Extreme events

Analysis and prediction of climate risks

Jakob Zscheischler is an Earth system scientist and heads the Compound Environmental Risks (CER) department at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig. His multidisciplinary research spans climate science, natural hazards, hydrology, and biogeochemistry.

The mathematician focuses, among other things, on compound weather and climate events: these often cause and reinforce each other, such as heat waves and droughts. They then place considerable strain on nature and society, for example, through health impacts and crop failures.

With his team, Zscheischler is researching the driving forces behind such events. He develops models to predict them and analyzes how we can better address these climate risks in the future. To do this, he combines climate data with climate impact models and machine learning methods.

Zscheischler has received several awards for his work and is one of the most cited researchers in the world. In addition to his work at the UFZ, he holds a professorship in Data Analytics in Hydrosciences at TU Dresden.

He received his doctorate from ETH Zurich in 2014, was awarded the Arne Richter Award by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in 2022 for outstanding young scientists, and headed the EU-wide DAMCOLES research network on combined weather and climate events from 2018 to 2023.