Jakob Zscheischler

NH Natural Hazards

The 2022 Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists is awarded to Jakob Zscheischler for fundamental work of an international standing, defining and developing models for the identification and risk assessment of compound and inter-related hazards, in a changing climate.

The multidisciplinary research of Jakob Zscheischler spans the areas of climate science, natural hazards, hydrology, and biogeochemistry. With over 66 journal articles on compound weather and climate events, as well as the forecast of rainfall precipitation, wind extremes and drought impacts, amongst others, he has a remarkable impact amongst scientists, decision makers and natural hazard modelers.
Jakob Zscheischler obtained his PhD (2014) developing a methodology for the global analysis of extreme events and consequences for the terrestrial carbon cycle. As an Earth scientist he is interested in machine learning to identify compounding meteorological drivers of extreme impacts such as floods, vegetation mortality and crop failure.

He has been awarded with prestigious grants in Switzerland and Germany including the Otto Hahn Medal for an outstanding PhD thesis within the Max Planck Society, and the Vladimir Peter Köppen Award. He is the Chair of the European COST Action DAMOCLES (Understanding and modeling compound climate and weather events) and a WP leader of the European H2020 project XAIDA.

Jakob Zscheischler is currently leading a group on compound weather and climate events at the Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ, Germany. Besides his dedication to describing and modeling combinations of multiple climate drivers and/or hazards that contribute to societal or environmental risk, Zscheischler also supervises postdoctoral and doctoral works, being a prominent leader in his field.