LUCAS Interim Meeting 2020

GERICS hosts virtual conference

On June 18th, the LUCAS Interim Meeting 2020 took place as a virtual conference, which was organized by GERICS scientist Diana Rechid. With Christina Asmus, Vanessa Reinhart and Peter Hoffmann, scientists from the HICSS project LANDMATE participated in the meeting and presented results from their project.

The CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study LUCAS (Land Use and Climate Across Scales) uses an ensemble of regional climate models to investigate the influence of land use changes on the regional climate in Europe and is coordinated by Diana Rechid.

Through the participation of scientists from all over Europe, the LUCAS model ensemble now consists of more than 10 regional climate models. At this year's Interim Meeting, current studies and interim results of the individual groups were presented. For example, the influence of afforestation on soil temperatures was investigated as well as the changes in regional precipitation dynamics due to land use changes.

Land cover distribution for the year 2015 based on ESA-CCI LC (© Hoffmann et al. 2020).
Distribution of land cover for 2015 based on the ESA-CCI LC data set.

Furthermore, the strategy for LUCAS Phase 2 was discussed. This includes the planning of several workshops on land-atmosphere interaction under specific regional conditions.

The next LUCAS meeting is planned for September 2020.