Junior Professor Dr. Sebastian Sippel - Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prizewinner 2024
Climate Research, University of Leipzig
Drought, heavy rain, storms and hail – to what extent are extreme weather events linked to climate change? This is the question being investigated by geoecologist and climate researcher Sebastian Sippel. As such, he is active in the only recently established research field of climate attribution, which involves the assessment of how a range of different causal factors contribute to a climate event relative to each other.
His work has contributed in a fundamental way to our understanding of climate change and its effects. Using a newly developed methodology, for example, he demonstrated that climate change can be detected as a global fingerprint in every single daily weather pattern after 2012. In another study, he succeeded in quantifying the influence of natural climate fluctuations on time scales over several decades. His multi-faceted studies also address the effects of global climate change on the water and carbon cycle.