President: Kerstin Treydte
(Emailcl@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Gabriele Messori
(Email)
ECS Representative: Valeria Mascolo
(Emailecs-cl@egu.eu)
The Division on Climate: Past, Present & Future (CL) is one of the larger divisions of the European Geosciences Union. It pools from many disciplines and consequently has many co-organised sessions with other divisions at the EGU General Assembly. The division is very interdisciplinary and covers climate variations on all time scales. CL includes the study of any kind of climate archive from rocks to ocean cores, speleothems, ice cores, chronicles, to instrumental records to name a few. Besides observations, climate modelling on all time scales from the deep past to the future are areas covered by the division. Any aspect of the climate system falls into the realm of the division e.g. atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, cryosphere, and geology. Themes focus on the climate on Earth but may also expand other planets or the Sun.
Latest posts from the CL blog
When ozone enters a leaf: why the details matter for Earth system models
(Schematic cross-section showing leaf stomatal O_3 uptake, chloroplast oxidative stress, and the resulting downregulation of Earth’s global photosynthetic carbon uptake (GPP)) We usually think of ozone as a shield high in the atmosphere or as an air pollutant that harms human lungs near the ground. But plants also “breathe” ozone. Through microscopic pores called stomata, leaves take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis—and ozone can enter through the same doorway. Once inside a leaf, ozone forms reactive compounds that disrupt photosynthesis …
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Challenges in accessibility and code quality of the climate models that underpin our understanding of climate change
Climate models help us understand how the climate system works, project future climate change, and provide evidence that supports international assessments such as exposed on the IPCC. At this point, there is a fundamental question that is rarely discussed and solved: Can we access and reproduce the climate models used throughout the history of the Coupled Model Intercomparision Project (CMIP)? In our recent study, we explored this question by assessing the accessibility and software quality of climate models that participated …
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Why the Same Soot Can Warm One City and Cool Another
Every time something burns incompletely —whether in a car engine, a factory furnace, a cooking fire, an agricultural field set alight after harvest, or a vast wildfire sweeping through savanna grasslands— tiny particles of black carbon are released into the atmosphere. You might know these more simply as soot. These particles are so small that thousands of them laid side by side would barely stretch across the width of a human hair. Yet despite their minuscule size, black carbon (also …
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Sudden Temperature Change in a Warming World: Why Future Temperature Swings Are a Global Tug-of-War?
Berlin just went through a brutal heatwave, and then out of nowhere, the temperature crashed between June 28 and 29. The daily mean temperature dropped from nearly 33°C to 25°C—a dramatic drop of about 8°C in just 24 hours (based on ERA5 reanalysis data structure accessed via Open-Meteo. Scientists call these abrupt shifts temperature volatility: rapid transitions from unusually cold to warm conditions—or vice versa—from one day to the next (Hamal & Pfahl, 2025). These sudden temperature changes can have …
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Recent awardees
The 2026 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to
Friederike E.L. Otto for pioneering extreme event attribution and transforming climate communication through the World Weather Attribution initiative.
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- 2026
- Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award
The 2026 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to
Marlow Julius Cramwinckel for innovative contributions to the combination of climate reconstructions and modelling to constrain climate, carbon cycle, and hydrological feedbacks in the past.
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The 2025 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to
Heather Marie Stoll for pioneering contributions in both marine and terrestrial palaeoclimate research, which led to groundbreaking advancement in our understanding of rapid climate change, through forcings and feedbacks.
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- 2025
- Milutin Milanković Medal
The 2025 Milutin Milanković Medal is awarded to
Zhengyu Liu for outstanding contributions to our understanding of global climate change by combining theoretical approaches, the development and use of a hierarchy of models, and model-data comparisons.
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- 2025
- Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award
The 2025 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to
Kai Kornhuber for outstanding research on extreme weather and climate dynamics, including circumglobal patterns in the jet stream, their relation to heatwaves and food security, and representation in climate models.
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- 2025
- Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award
The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to
Devika Moovidathu Vasudevan Upper Tropospheric Humidity and Cloud Radiative Forcing: A Tropical Perspective
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- 2025
- Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award
The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to
Lison Soussaintjean Towards understanding the N2O production in dust-rich Antarctic ice
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- 2025
- Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award
The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to
Ramona Schneider Magnetic fabric of Tajik loess-palaeosols as a palaeowind and process indicator
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- 2025
- Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award
The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to
Tatiana Bebchuk Subfossil yew (Taxus baccata) wood from eastern England reveals mid-Holocene climate and environmental changes
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Current issue of the EGU newsletter
In our August issue, we reflect on the lessons learned from past disasters associated with natural hazards, and hear from the Early Career Scientist rep for the Natural Hazards Division Elisa Nobile. Don't miss your chance to register for one of our six autumn workshops and applications are open to volunteer with the Outreach Committee. The call for sessions for EGU27 is open and don't miss your chance to nominate someone to be the Union's next Early Career Scientist (ECS) Union-wide Representative or Treasurer!
All this and much more, in this month's Loupe!
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