Stiftung Wissen der Sparkasse KölnBonn: Intelligent Methods for Earth System Sciences

18^th -21^st November 2025

The Stiftung Wissen Sparkasse KölnBonn focuses on a current and innovative research topic in its annual series of events. From November 18^th till 21^st, 2025, the focus was on “Intelligent Methods for Earth System Sciences”; the Key Profile Area (KPA) IMfESS at the University of Cologne, together with the Stiftung Wissen, offered and carried out a comprehensive package consisting of a student event, a public panel discussion, and a specialist symposium.

The event for students from Bonn's “Bonns Fünfte” comprehensive school consisted of three different modules:

On November 18^th, the three scientists, meteorologist Jun.-Prof. Dr. Pfannerstill, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Riedesel and Dr. Anita Katheras from the Department of Geography, visited the students at their school to give a general introduction to the topic and their own research areas and to show them more details about the carbon cycle. The students were able to measure the CO₂ content of the air with measuring devices and visualize crystal structures and lattices on the computer.

On November 19^th, the students visited Cologne and viewed the climate and weather station on the university sports grounds, which is operated by the Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology in cooperation with the City of Cologne. Despite the rain, Dr. Bernhard Pospichal was able to provide a good insight into the various measuring instruments at the station. The highlight was the launch of a weather balloon carrying a small package of measuring instruments that flew approximately 150 km eastward. Everyone was then able to view the measured data at the Stiftung Wissen premises. Afterwards, Dr. Florentine Weber gave an introduction to weather models and the introduction of AI into the work and development of weather models. The topic of AI was very interesting for the students, so that a lot of questions arose. Many questions were answered, and some were taken directly to the experts at the

public panel discussion in the evening on the topic:

“AI as an opportunity for climate research?”

• What are Earth system sciences?
• What does computer science offer?
• Do we need computer science and artificial intelligence to understand our Earth and climate system?

The panel participants

• Prof. Dr. Susanne Crewell, University of Cologne, Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology
• Prof. Dr. Christian Sohler, University of Cologne, Institute of Computer Science
• Prof. Dr. Philip Stier, University of Oxford, Department of Physics
• Sophie Xhonneux, Ph.D. student in Montreal, Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute
• Moderator: Carolin Riethmüller, science journalist

provided valuable insights into their fields of research and gave convincing answers, including that we still have a lot to learn about how AI works, but that it definitely represents an opportunity to make progress in research.

Specialist symposium

On November 20^th and 21^st, scientists from the fields of Earth system science and computer science had the opportunity to engage in scientific exchange in a pleasant and intensive working atmosphere as part of the specialist symposium in order to develop new ideas for this interdisciplinary topic area.