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Environmetrics

JProf. Dr. Nils Weitzel

TU Dortmund University
Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Str.25
44227 Dortmund
Germany

Phone: +49 231 755 7872

About

Nils Weitzel is Juniorprofessor for Environmetrics at TU Dortmund University. His research develops statistical methods to understand the spatio-temporal structure of climate variability, to reconstruct past climate from natural archives like pollen, and to incorporate constraints from past climate into future projections of the Earth system. After studying mathematics and geography, he wrote his PhD thesis in meteorology at the University of Bonn. The topic of his thesis was the reconstruction of climate fields from vegetation proxies using Bayesian hierarchical models. He was a Postdoc at Heidelberg University and the University of Tübingen from 2019 to 2024, working in the STACY project led by Kira Rehfeld and as PI of the NFDI4Earth Pilot Propagating complex uncertainties in data cubes. Until September 2025, he was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom), leading the project Utilising palaeobotanical data to calibrate the response of vegetation to carbon dioxide in Earth system models. He is a steering group member of the PAGES working group "Climate Variability Across Scales (CVAS)".

Research Interests

  • Statistical methods in climate and environmental sciences
  • Spatio-temporal structure of climate and vegetation variability
  • Spatio-temporal data
  • Probabilistic model-data comparison
  • Bayesian methods for paleoclimate reconstructions

Publications and software

2025

  • Baudouin, J.-P., Weitzel, N., May, M., Jonkers, L., Dolman, A. M., and Rehfeld, K.: Testing the reliability of global surface temperature reconstructions of the Last Glacial Cycle with pseudo-proxy experiments, Clim. Past, 21, 381–403, doi.org/10.5194/cp-21-381-2025, 2025.
  • Braschoss, L., Weitzel, N., Baudouin, J.-P., and Rehfeld, K.: State Dependency of Dynamic and Thermodynamic Contributions to Effective Precipitation Changes, Journal of Climate, 38, 731–748, doi.org/10.1175/jcli-d-24-0355.1, 2025.
  • Bruch, A. A., Kern, A. K., Stebich, M., Weitzel, N., and Bolus, M.: Large-scale vegetation shifts during substantial warming — Proxy-based biome reconstructions of MIS 6 and MIS 5e in Europe, Quaternary Science Reviews, 356, 109308, doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2025.109308, 2025.
  • Trombini, I., Weitzel, N., Valdes, P. J., Baudouin, J.-P., Armstrong, E., and Rehfeld, K.: Atmospheric and Oceanic Pathways Drive Separate Modes of Southern Hemisphere Climate in Simulations of Spontaneous Dansgaard-Oeschger-Type Oscillations, Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2024GL111473, doi.org/10.1029/2024GL111473, 2025.
  • Savytska, Y., Smolii, V., and Weitzel, N.: ESD Ideas: Near-real-time preliminary detection of carbon dioxide source and sink areas using a Laplacian filter, Earth Syst. Dynam., 16, 721–727, doi.org/10.5194/esd-16-721-2025, 2025.
  • Slattery, J., Sime, L. C., Rehfeld, K., Weitzel, N., Malmierca‐Vallet, I., Zhang, X., Valdes, P. J., and Muschitiello, F.: A Global Speleothem‐Based Assessment of Spontaneous Dansgaard–Oeschger Type Oscillations in Two Isotope‐Enabled General Circulation Models, Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2025GL114906, doi.org/10.1029/2025GL114906, 2025.
  • Weitzel, N., Racky, M., Braschoss, L., and Rehfeld, K.: Towards model-to-measurement data cubes with rigorous uncertainty propagation, NFDI4Earth Community on Zenodo, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14627370, 2025.
  • Weitzel, N., Racky, M., and Braschoss, L.: cupsm v1.0.0: A python package for proxy system modeling with data cubes, zenodo (software), doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14624116, 2025.
  • Ziegler, E., Weitzel, N., Baudouin, J.-P., Kapsch, M.-L., Mikolajewicz, U., Gregoire, L., Ivanovic, R., Valdes, P. J., Wirths, C., and Rehfeld, K.: Patterns of changing surface climate variability from the Last Glacial Maximum to present in transient model simulations, Clim. Past, 21, 627–659, doi.org/10.5194/cp-21-627-2025, 2025.

2024

  • Weitzel, N., Andres, H., Baudouin, J.-P., Kapsch, M.-L., Mikolajewicz, U., Jonkers, L., Bothe, O., Ziegler, E., Kleinen, T., Paul, A., and Rehfeld, K.: Towards spatio-temporal comparison of simulated and reconstructed sea surface temperatures for the last deglaciation, Clim. Past, 20, 865–890, doi.org/10.5194/cp-20-865-2024, 2024.

2023

  • Chevalier, M., Dallmeyer, A., Weitzel, N., Li, C., Baudouin, J.-P., Herzschuh, U., Cao, X., and Hense, A.: Refining data–data and data–model vegetation comparisons using the Earth mover’s distance (EMD), Clim. Past, 19, 1043–1060, doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-1043-2023, 2023.
  • Endo, K., Monahan, A. H., Bessac, J., Christensen, H. M., and Weitzel, N.: Robustness of the Stochastic Parameterization of Subgrid-Scale Wind Variability in Sea Surface Fluxes, Monthly Weather Review, 151, 2587–2607, doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-22-0319.1, 2023.
  • Fohlmeister, J., Sekhon, N., Columbu, A., Vettoretti, G., Weitzel, N., Rehfeld, K., Veiga-Pires, C., Ben-Yami, M., Marwan, N., and Boers, N.: Global reorganization of atmospheric circulation during Dansgaard–Oeschger cycles, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120, e2302283120, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2302283120, 2023.
  • Laepple, T., Ziegler, E., Weitzel, N., Hébert, R., Ellerhoff, B., Schoch, P., Martrat, B., Bothe, O., Moreno-Chamarro, E., Chevalier, M., Herbert, A., and Rehfeld, K.: Regional but not global temperature variability underestimated by climate models at supradecadal timescales, Nat. Geosci., 16, 958–966, doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01299-9, 2023.
  • Malmierca-Vallet, I., Sime, L. C., and the D–O community members [incl. Weitzel, N.]: Dansgaard–Oeschger events in climate models: review and baseline Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3) protocol, Clim. Past, 19, 915–942, doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-915-2023, 2023.
  • Wider, J., Kruse, J., Weitzel, N., Bühler, J. C., Köthe, U., and Rehfeld, K.: Towards learned emulation of interannual water isotopologue variations in General Circulation Models, Environ. Data Science, 2, e35, doi.org/10.1017/eds.2023.29, 2023.

2022

  • Adam, M., Ellerhoff, B., Baudouin, J.-P., and Weitzel, N.: PTBoxProxydata: The Proxy Data Manager for a consistent, efficient and reusable data workflow for (paleo) time series within the PaleoToolBox (PTBox), R package version 0.2.2, github.com/paleovar/ptboxproxytools, 2022.
  • Axen, S. D., Gessner, A., Sommer, C., Weitzel, N., and Tejero-Cantero, Á.: Spatiotemporal modeling of European paleoclimate using doubly sparse Gaussian processes, 2022 NeurIPS Workshop on Gaussian Processes, Spatiotemporal Modeling, and Decision-making Systems, doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2211.08160, 2022.
  • Dallmeyer, A., Kleinen, T., Claussen, M., Weitzel, N., Cao, X., and Herzschuh, U.: The deglacial forest conundrum, Nat Commun, 13, 6035, doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33646-6, 2022.
  • Weitzel, N., Ellerhoff, B., and Adam, M.: PTBoxProxytools: PTBox proxy tools for time series processing and analysis, R package version 0.1.1, github.com/paleovar/ptboxproxydata, 2022.
  • Weitzel, N., Hense, A., Herzschuh, U., Böhmer, T., Cao, X., and Rehfeld, K.: A state estimate of Siberian summer temperature and moisture availability during the Last Glacial Maximum combining pollen records and climate simulations, preprint, doi.org/10.31223/X59P9H, 2022.

2021

  • Adam, M., Weitzel, N., and Rehfeld, K.: Identifying Global‐Scale Patterns of Vegetation Change During the Last Deglaciation From Paleoclimate Networks, Paleoceanog and Paleoclimatol, 36, e2021PA004265, doi.org/10.1029/2021PA004265, 2021.
  • Bessac, J., Christensen, H. M., Endo, K., Monahan, A. H., and Weitzel, N.: Scale‐Aware Space‐Time Stochastic Parameterization of Subgrid‐Scale Velocity Enhancement of Sea Surface Fluxes, J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst., 13, doi.org/10.1029/2020MS002367, 2021.
  • Weitzel, N., Brierley, C., Bühler, J., Chevalier, M., Ellerhoff, B., Skiba, V., and Rehfeld, K.: Beyond paleoclimate ping pong, PAGES Mag, 29, 107–107, doi.org/10.22498/pages.29.2.107, 2021.

2020

  • Weitzel, N.: Climate field reconstructions from pollen and macrofossil syntheses using Bayesian hierarchical models. Bonn, Dissertation, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:5-56875, 2020.

2019

  • Bessac, J., Monahan, A. H., Christensen, H. M., and Weitzel, N.: Stochastic Parameterization of Subgrid-Scale Velocity Enhancement of Sea Surface Fluxes, Monthly Weather Review, 147, 1447–1469, doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-18-0384.1, 2019.
  • Khider, D., Emile‐Geay, J., McKay, N.P., Gil, Y., Garijo, D., Ratnakar, V., ... Weitzel, N., ...: PaCTS 1.0: A Crowdsourced Reporting Standard for Paleoclimate Data. Paleoceanog and Paleoclimatol, 34, 1570-1596, doi.org/10.1029/2019PA003632, 2019.
  • Lu, F., Weitzel, N., and Monahan, A. H.: Joint state-parameter estimation of a nonlinear stochastic energy balance model from sparse noisy data, Nonlin. Processes Geophys., 26, 227–250, doi.org/10.5194/npg-26-227-2019, 2019.
  • Weitzel, N., Hense, A., and Ohlwein, C.: Combining a pollen and macrofossil synthesis with climate simulations for spatial reconstructions of European climate using Bayesian filtering, Clim. Past, 15, 1275–1301, doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-1275-2019, 2019.
  • Weitzel, N., Wagner, S., Sjolte, J., Klockmann, M., Bothe, O., Andres, H., Tarasov, L., Rehfeld, K., Zorita, E., Widmann, M., Sommer, P., Schädler, G., Ludwig, P., Kapp, F., Jonkers, L., García-Pintado, J., Fuhrmann, F., Dolman, A., Dallmeyer, A., and Brücher, T.: Diving into the Past: A Paleo Data–Model Comparison Workshop on the Late Glacial and Holocene, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 100, ES1–ES4, doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0169.1, 2019.

2018

  • Andres, H., Bothe, O., Rehfeld, K., Wagner, S., Weitzel, N., and Zorita, E.: An integrated proxy and simulation data initiative for the Holocene and the last deglaciation, PAGES Mag, 26, 85–85, doi.org/10.22498/pages.26.2.85, 2018.
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