The research group Environmetrics, led by JProf. Dr. Nils Weitzel, develops statistical methods for climate and environmental sciences. Studying the chaotic and high dimensional Earth system requires dedicated and robust statistical approaches. To this purpose, we collaborate with experts coming from a variety of disciplines, including meteorology, geosciences, and physics. Current research topics are the spatio-temporal structure of climate variability, climate field reconstructions from natural archives like sediment and ice cores with Bayesian hierarchical models, and new methods to incorporate constraints from past climate and Earth observations into future projections of the Earth system, including impacts of climate change on natural disasters, ecosystems, and energy systems.

Thesis Projects: Please contact us if you are interested to write your Bachelor or Master thesis in our group. Please include a short description of the topics your are interested in, a transcript of records, and a brief CV. You can also find current thesis topics in the Statistics Thesis Exchange.

Open PhD position: We are hiring a PhD student to develop new statistical methods to infer spatio-temporal climate variability patterns from sparse observations, and integrate observational constraints on climate variability into future Earth system projections using statistical postprocessing methods. Applications documents (motivation letter, CV, copies of your certificates, a short summary of your Master thesis, and contact details of two referees) can be send as one pdf file to environmetrics@rc-trust.ai. The application deadline is March 12, 2026. Full details here.