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What we do

High-resolution Earth System monitoring and diagnostics for sustainable applications (HIRES-APP)

The project HIRES-APP (2024–2027) of the Hans-Ertel-Cen­tre for Weath­er Research (HErZ) is a joint research group of the Uni­ver­si­ties of Bonn, Cologne and Tübin­gen. Our research aims at pro­vid­ing basic research for the Ger­man Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (Deutsch­er Wet­ter­di­enst, DWD) and to ini­ti­ate and sup­port new devel­op­ments with­in DWD. We con­tribute pri­mar­i­ly to the HErZ com­pe­tence areas Cli­mate mon­i­tor­ing and Earth sys­tem fore­cast­ing with con­tri­bu­tions to Data assim­i­la­tion and pre­dictabil­i­ty as well as Opti­mal use of weath­er and cli­mate infor­ma­tion.

Specif­i­cal­ly, we aim to derive and apply nov­el ver­ti­cal pro­fil­ing meth­ods for tem­per­a­ture, humid­i­ty, winds and tur­bu­lence with­in the tro­pos­phere and eval­u­ate their impact on high-res­o­lu­tion region­al (re)analysis and short-term weath­er fore­casts. A spe­cial focus is on opti­mal­ly exploit­ing Unmanned Aer­i­al Sys­tems (UAS) with mete­o­ro­log­i­cal pay­load, state-of-the-art ground-based remote sens­ing in com­bi­na­tion with the new Meteosat Third Gen­er­a­tion Sounder (MTG-S1) satel­lite launched suc­cess­ful­ly in July 2025. For this we orga­nize the VITAL I & II mea­sure­ment cam­paigns.

HIRES-APP also con­tributes to opti­mal­ly exploit­ing weath­er and cli­mate infor­ma­tion for soci­ety. With our part­ner EWI (Insti­tute of Ener­gy Eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cologne), a stake­hold­er-ori­ent­ed ener­gy index that quan­ti­fies the impact of spe­cif­ic weath­er events (e.g. “Dunkelflaut­en”) on the ener­gy sys­tem is being devel­oped.

HErZ Cologne/Bonn Legacy

HIRES-APP builds upon the lega­cy of three for­mer HErZ fund­ing phas­es at the Uni­ver­si­ties of Cologne and Bonn — the for­mer HErZ for Cli­mate Mon­i­tor­ing and Diag­nos­tics, in which the COSMO reanaly­ses were ini­tial­ly devel­oped and applied in the con­text of renew­able ener­gy appli­ca­tions.

We con­tin­ue the work of the pre­vi­ous phas­es using reanaly­ses for renew­able ener­gy assess­ments in Ger­many and Europe. This includes cli­ma­to­log­i­cal assess­ments of poten­tial chal­lenges in the pro­duc­tion of renew­able pow­er, e.g., mete­o­ro­log­i­cal sit­u­a­tions that are asso­ci­at­ed with min­i­ma in both solar and wind pow­er gen­er­a­tion. Fur­ther, we explore the lim­its of mete­o­ro­log­i­cal resources for renew­able pow­er pro­duc­tion on dif­fer­ent scales.

A fur­ther focus remains on Sta­tis­ti­cal Post-Pro­cess­ing Approach­es in Earth Sys­tem mod­els.