Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK)

Description of the organisation

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) was founded in year 1992 as a member of the Leibniz association. The non-profit research institute employs about 300 people. Among them are about 200 natural and social scientists. On the international forefront, the institute addresses a broad spectrum of scientific questions regarding global climate change and sustainable development while providing trans-disciplinary concepts for climate impact mitigation and political decision-making. In 2017, PIK published 370 articles where 82% appeared in refereed ISI journals. Among them, 35 are appearing in high-impact journals (26 in Nature, seven in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, one in Science Advances and one in Science). In the same year PIK, publications were cited more than 20000 times. PIK essentially contributed to the scientific reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Expertise particularly relevant for the project

PIK is a leading institute in the research field of the ocean circulation dynamics with a primary focus on the AMOC, which is documented by a multitude of peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals. PIK’s more than twenty years long experience in complex Earth system development and modelling makes it an excellent partner in addressing scientific questions regarding natural and anthropogenic global climate change on time scales ranging from deep paleo-times to near future projections. The suite of Earth system models of intermediate complexity (EMIC’s) developed at PIK – among them CLIMBER-3 and POEM (under development) – allows to efficiently simulating the evolution of relevant climate system variables within the necessary accuracy requirements. Notably, the investigation of a weakening/shut-down of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and its potential impacts on the marine biogeochemistry as a consequence of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 requires the time integration of the models into a steady-state over several thousand years. The efficient run-time performances of the EMICs on PIKs own high-performance computer cluster (an IBM / Lenovo NeXtScale based system) provides the necessary precondition to successfully accomplish the proposed task.

For more information visit PIK website.