Our research is focused on:

• Terrestrial Laserscanning - TLS
• Unmaned Airborne Vehicles - UAV
• Scientific data management
• Mobile GIS applications and locateion based services
• GIS-aided Modelling
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Our research is focused on:

• Transport of microplastics in soil and on soil surfaces (SFB 1357 Microplastics)
• Road-related trade-offs between conservation and development (SFB/TR 228 Future Rural Africa)

Main interests and research issues of this study group concentrate on environmental economic geography and regional development. Major research interests include environmental management and governance, environmental and social impacts of globalization, transnational value chains and socio-economic aspects of natural hazards....Read more

The research and teaching activities of the group under the direction of Prof. Dr. Peter Dannenberg focus on the following research areas:

• Global South in the Context of Economic Globalization
• Development and Sustainability in the Global South
• European City and Regional Development

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The main research focus of the working group is on urbanisation and megacities, urban governance, urban risk management, urban health and migration research...Read more

The research activities of the Soil Geography/Soil Science working group focus on work on the behavior of pollutants in contaminated soils and studies on the characterization and material turnover of soils with (temporarily) reducing conditions. Process-oriented work and the linking of field and laboratory investigations are the focus of the working group. The working group has a modern 800 m² laboratory at its disposal...Read more

The Geomorphology & Geochronology group is primarily concerned with how physical, biological and anthropogenic processes shape our Earth's surface. The aim is to better understand process relationships in sedimentary, soil and landscape systems in order to better predict their dynamics in the course of global environmental change. The working group is currently under construction.

One research focus is the development of luminescence-based methods for the age determination of sediments and the quantification of soil and landscape processes.

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Regions are facing several challenges triggered by enforced structural change and increased interdependence of economic processes – as a result of an intensified globalization. As a consequence, there are simultaneous processes of growth, stagnation and decline across the globe. The research focus of our working group are regions at different development levels....Read more

The central research topic at the Chair of Hydrogeography and Climatology is the study of water, carbon and nutrient fluxes at the land surface. In particular, we are dedicated to the study of the spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of these fluxes, their interactions with each other and interactions with the climate system...Read more

The Quaternary covers the past 2.6 million years. It thus forms the youngest chronostratigraphic system in the history of the earth. The Quaternary is of particular importance (1) for paleoclimate research, as it is characterized by a particularly cold and variable climate, (2) for environmental research, since future environmental developments can be inferred from the Quaternary history and (3) for the georesources, since groundwater and important building and raw materials are stored to a large extent in quaternary sediments...Read more

Our research is concerned with the methodological development and application of cosmogenic nuclides for geoscientific questions. The laboratories (from cleanroom facilities to ISO 6 laboratories) are designed for the preparation of samples for terrestrial ¹⁰Be, ¹⁴C (in-situ), ²⁶Al- and ³⁶Cl analysis. Furthermore, the chemical processing of heavy ions such as ^{239,240,242,244}Pu isotopes for subsequent measurement using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry is available in our laboratories...Read more

The Mineralogy/Crystallography group is concerned with the atomic structure, physical and thermodynamic properties of crystalline and non-crystalline matter (minerals, melts, glasses, aqueous fluids) and their interaction in the Earth system. Experimental approaches are combined with molecular-scale simulations.

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The Organic Geochemistry & Radiocarbon Group is using radiocarbon analysis and organic geochemical methods to investigate carbon cycling and transport processes in terrestrial and marine environments as well as for the reconstruction of palaeoclimatic conditions.

Our special interest is the radiocarbon analysis of organic 'biomarker' compounds isolated with chromatographic methods from soils and sediments as well as ¹⁴C analysis of CO₂. 

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The Working Group on Micropalaeontology and Palaeoecology (MicPal) at the University of Cologne aims to provide new perspectives on past ecosystems and ocean-climate dynamics through foraminiferal research.

Foraminifera are single-celled organisms that occupy a vast range of benthic and planktic habitats in the world’s oceans

The MicPal lab is equipped with facilities for the storage and preparation of microfossil samples and state of the art stereo microscopes combined with digital imaging systems...Read more

The Geo-/ Cosmochemistry working group focuses on development and application of novel analytical techniques in the fields of isotope and trace element geochemistry. Our research focus is placed on high temperature processes related to crust-mantle evolution on Earth, the origin of the solar system and early Earth evolution. Over the past years, low temperature processes have additionally become a research topic of our group...Read more

The Petrology workgroup at the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy has a broad interest in the origin of magmatic and metamorphic rocks. Past projects, led by Prof. Dr. Reiner Kleinschrodt, have focused on rocks of the lower continental crust, with study areas in northern Italy, Sri Lanka, southern India. Current projects, led by Dr. Yannick Bussweiler, deal with various intracontinental volcanic rocks (such as kimberlites and alkali basalts) and their mantle xenoliths (fragments of the Earth’s mantle transported to the surface by deep volcanoes)....Read more

Current topics of the working group:

• Extreme CO² greenhouse heated up the young earth: High temperatures on the young Earth with low solar radiation were probably caused by a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere / With the onset of plate tectonics, it got colder as the CO² was gradually stored on the continents.. 
• Even the Neanderthals suffered from climate change: changing climate conditions, dryness and drought could have been largely responsible for the extinction of the Neanderthals.

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Geobiological research explores the interplay of the biosphere and the geosphere and their co-evolution through space and time.

Geobiology aims to fundamentally understand recent biogeochemical processes in order to reconstruct ancient life and changes of environment conditions. Since the Precambrian microorganisms shape the earth by inducing mineral precipitation forming geological structures but also destroying them via biocorrosion.

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The Earthquake station in Bensberg belongs to this working group:

The most important task of the Bensberg earthquake station today is the recording and scientific evaluation of the earthquakes in the northern Rhineland, especially the Lower Rhine Bay. From a geological point of view, the subsidence area of this bay, which is relatively young, is one of the most important earthquake regions in Germany, along with the Upper Rhine Graben, the Swabian Jura and the Vogtland...Read more

The research group RG Tezkan focuses on Applied Geophysics. This field of work utilises geophysical measurement methods in order to find mineral deposits of resources such as oil, gas, or metal ore, in the upper 10 km of the Earth's crust. The increasingly important applications in environmental geophysics also belong to the applied geophysics. They explore the uppermost 1000 m, for example, in the context of disposal and contaminated sites or ground water. The last group belonging to the applied geophysics are the engineer geophysics, which play an important role in the preparation of large building measures.

The research group RG Saur is focused on "space physics". Space Physics encompass the physics of the (Earth-near) open space, mainly the magnetosphere and solar wind. In a wider sense they include the application of knowledge obtained on the system Earth to other planets and moons, for example the investigation of the interactions between the magnetosphere of Saturn and the moon Titan. Main topics of the research group of Prof. Joachim Saur are magnetic fields and plasma.

The AG Crewell is focused on different topics of meteorology. An example: The Arctic is experiencing rapid changes which result from complex feedback mechanisms which are not well understood. A better understanding of the Arctic climate system is thus a key challenge which we address by exploiting ground-based and satellite remote sensing observations. In particular, we want to gain insight into water vapor, clouds, precipitation and radiative effects in the Arctic. Detailed observations are crucial here and available from long-term measurements at Ny-Ålesund but also from campaign based activities, e.g. MOSAiC.

The AG Löhnert is focused on exploiting observations in meteorology: There are much too few observations in the lowest 1-2 km of the atmosphere, the so-called atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). We perform research on new meteorological observation systems and investigate if and how these can improve our knowledge on the structure of the ABL, e.g. temperature, humidity and winds. Developing such methods can help us shed light on the physical processes in the ABL such as turbulent fluxes or cloud and precipitation formation. Also, we investigate the impact of these observational methods on short-term weather forecasts and high-resolution re-analyses.  

The research group for Integrated Scale-Adaptive Parameterization and Evaluation (InScAPE) RG Neggers aims to develop scale-adaptive parameterizations of small-scale turbulent/convective processes and clouds for larger-scale models, and to constrain those with relevant measurements as obtained from permanent meteorological “supersites”. In addition, we investigate the role of boundary layer clouds in a larger context, including their coupling to the Earth's surface and the role they play in global climate change.

The research group RG Shao focuses on the modeling and parameterization of the dynamic processes, which are responsible for the interactions between the various components of the climate system. The use of integrated modeling systems enables the embedding of expert knowledge of various other sciences.

Our leading research objective: Help engineers understand how software-intensive systems will behave in reality

We are actively doing reserach in the areas Requirements Engineering, Software Engineering & Machine Learning, Explainable Intelligent Systems, Research Software Engineering, Data-driven Systems Engineering and Model-based Systems Engineering. Almost each area is leaded by one of our team members.

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The group activities comprise research and teaching in the area of Interactive Visualization and Visual Analytics.

We combine interactive visualization with data analysis techniques for decision making. We develop new visual-interactive techniques for

• Data exploration

• Data analysis

• Data presentation and publishing

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Algorithmic data analysis in research and teaching

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Areas of Research:

• High Performance Computing
• Distributed Computing
• Operating Systems
• Modelling and Simulation
• Big Data

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The AG Gassner deals with the construction, analysis and efficient implementation of numerical methods for the solution of nonlinear processes describing strong advection, such as compressible turbulent flows or plasmas. For this purpose, so-called structure-preserving methods are developed, which exactly reproduce special properties of the mathematical problem (conservation, entropy, kinetic energy).  The focus is also on the efficient implementation of these methods on massively parallel high performance computers, e.g., in the open source simulation package

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The research group AG Klawonn works on the development of efficient numerical methods for the simulation of problems from computational science and engineering. This comprises the development of efficient algorithms, their theoretical analysis, and the implementation on large parallel computers with up to several hundreds of thousands of cores. A special focus in the applications is currently on problems from biomechanics/medicine, structural mechanics, and material science. 

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The research topics of AG Kunoth are:

• Numerical Analysis of PDEs: Wavelet and multiscale techniques for the numerical solution of elliptic partial differential equations, in particular: treatment of boundary conditions and boundaries, fictitious domain methods, preconditioning, least squares methods, adaptive methods.
• Numerical Analysis of Control Problems: above approaches for the numerical solution of control problems with PDE constraints.
• Approximation Theory: Construction of biorthogonal wavelets and multiwavelets on bounded domains; Approximation of Digital Terrain Elevation Data; Optimal encoding; Approximation by ridge functions.
• Computer Aided Geometric Design, Statistics: Curve and surface fitting of nonuniformly distributed data and data with outliers by adaptive wavelets with smoothing
• Numerical Analysis of Inverse Problems: Mathematical modelling and numerical simulations for the lithographic generation of nanostructures
• Numerical Analysis of Problems in Computational Finance: Option pricing computations by multiscale methods
• Numerical Analysis of Problems in Micromagnetics: Simulation of thin-film ferromagnetic elements

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