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
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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Weaker but more frequent: how sea breezes are changing in a warming climate
For the 500 million people living along the Mediterranean coast, the sea breeze is an essential component of the regional climate. They are more than a pleasant coastal wind, as they are critical for easing summer heat stress, dispersing pollutants, and triggering convection (the rapid upward movement of warm, moist air), sometimes leading to severe storms, among many others. But the Mediterranean basin is warming 20% to 40% faster than the globe, with the land warming faster than the ocean, …
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What can Greenland ice cores tell us about winter extreme events over Europe?
Introduction Human-caused climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events around the world, and Europe is no exception. These events typically last from a few days to several weeks or even months. Using climate models and reanalysis products, scientists are studying how extreme weather events will evolve and where they are likely to become more frequent and intense in a warming world, particularly in vulnerable regions. Paleoclimate research makes an important contribution to this effort. Changes in global …
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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 July issue, we are looking back on 50 years of Martian photography, learn more about science communication with twice the Simon Clark, don't miss your chance to apply for the Science for Policy Pairing Scheme. Also applications are open to volunteer with the EDI Committee or the Art-Science Working Group, the call for sessions for EGU27 is open and don't miss your chance to nominate someone to e 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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