Jan Clemens

WarmWorld is a German climate research project bringing together several major research institutions to improve ICON, a global climate model, so it can make sharper, more local climate predictions and better forecast extreme weather. The goal is to shrink the model's resolution down to just 1–5 km, much finer than today's typical models, which requires making the model faster, more precise, and easier to use. It's funded by the German government (BMFTR) and led by experts from institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the Alfred Wegener Institute, the German Climate Computing Center, and the University of Cologne. My contribution focused on integrating our own chemistry transport model into ICON as a plugin, enabling high resolution simulation of how gases and particles move through the atmosphere at the finer scales targeted by the project.

This project studied how the Asian summer monsoon connects the near-surface atmosphere over Southeast Asia to the upper atmosphere on a global scale, through a large international research collaboration. We found that the monsoon acts as a major pathway, lifting moisture, aerosols, and pollutants up into the high atmosphere and out toward the poles. This affects atmospheric chemistry, including the breakdown of stratospheric ozone, and changes how the atmosphere absorbs and reflects radiation, which matters for climate. Long-range transport of aerosols like ammonium nitrate can also influence cloud formation, adding another way this process shapes weather and climate. My contribution included climatological analysis ahead of the field campaign to help identify promising measurement locations, and during the campaign, working closely with the measurement team to analyze near-real-time model simulations of the relevant atmospheric processes. I also supported flight planning using PLANET and MSS, a tool set that displays the aircraft's flight path on a map with additional data overlays.

GRIPS is a long-term measurement project at the University of Wuppertal that tracks the temperature of the atmosphere at around 87 km altitude, using ground-based infrared spectrometers to observe natural airglow emissions at night. The project has been running continuously since 1987, making it one of the longest-running datasets of its kind, and contributes to an international network monitoring this atmospheric region. I worked on the software that processes the raw measurements into temperature data, maintaining and improving it, integrating a spectra simulation tool into the workflow, and analyzed the resulting temperature data to check for and understand possible systematic errors.