Current project

Friederike joined the ECI to work as a Post Doctoral Research Assistant on ensemble-based quantification of uncertainty in climate impact projections (EQUIP project) reporting to Professor Myles Allen.

The overall objective of EQUIP is to explore the propagation of uncertainty from external drivers to actual impacts of climate change, focusing in particular on the medium-term time-scale of 10 to 50 years.

Oxford University are responsible for Workpackage 4 of EQUIP, the generation of probabilistic climate projections based on a range of methods for use in impact modelling. To do this Friederike will be working with the emerging CMIP-5 dataset as it becomes available, focusing in particular on how the distribution of impact-relevant variables in CMIP-5 compares to other methods of ensemble climate projection, including the climateprediction.net projects latest projections from the weatherathome experiment.

Profile

Friederike studied Physics and Philosophy at the University of Potsdam and holds a Diploma (Masters Equivalent) in Physics (gained in 2007). For her Diploma project she worked at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute of Polar and Marine Research on the influence of stratospheric chemistry on planetary wave dynamics in complex climate models.

Friederike finished her PhD thesis on the philosophy of science at the Free University of Berlin in June 2011. During her PhD project Friederike worked as researcher at the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research in the Research Domain Earth System Analysis. Her research was about the epistemic status of climate modelling focussing on the philosophic analysis of this status and providing guidelines to achieve certain aims of climate modelling.

Publications

• Massey, N., Aina, T., Rye, C., Otto, F.E.L., Wilson, S., Jones, R. G., and Allen, M.R. (2012) The attribution of warm November and cold December Central England temperatures. [in “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective”]. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., accepted.
• Otto, F. E. L., N. Massey, G. J. van Oldenborgh, R. G. Jones, and M. R. Allen (2012), Reconciling two approaches to attribution of the 2010 Russian heat wave, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L04702, doi:10.1029/2011GL050422.
• Otto, F.E.L. (2012) Modelling the earth's climate - an epistemic perspective, PhD thesis.
• Otto, F. E. L. (2010). Von Kopenhagen nach Mexiko. Dokumente 65.
• Otto, F. E. L. (2009). Auf dem Weg in die Klimakatastrophe? Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 52.
• Otto, F. E. L. (2007). Influence of a simplified ozon chemistry in the stratosphere of the planetary wave dynamics in a complex climate model. Diploma Thesis.