The ESM project comprises eight Helmholtz Research Centers and aims at the development of a common Earth system modelling platform of the Helmholtz Research Field Earth and Environment in order to facilitate effective collaboration between partners and to support the development of a modelling strategy for POF-IV and beyond. The project intends to improve the numerical representation of the individual components of the Earth system and their coupling, as well as to perform a series of selected frontier simulations to address Grand Challenges.
Section Earth System Modelling is in particular engaged in Tasks 1.4 and 2.1.

The main goal of the study is calculation of the lithospheric stress field of Europe taking into account all the major factors. This shall be done by means of 3D high-resolution thermo-mechanical and density model of the lithosphere coupled with the global mantle convection model.

At the end of the nominal five-year mission period of GRACE-FO in May 2023, the European Space Agency (ESA) will cover the financing of mission operations for the twin satellites. Since 2021, ESA has been financing already accompanying work on the scientific evaluation of mission data.

Since 2019, the Research Unit "New Refined Observations of Climate Change from Spaceborne Gravity Missions" has been developing new background models and evaluation methods for the GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite gravimetry missions.

MANTIS is a project in a DFG Priority Program SPP 1788: "Study od Earth dynamics with a constellation of potential field missions" which is designed around the ESA magnetic field satellite mission SWARM.

The world ocean is good conductor of electricity, due to its high concentration of dissolved salts. As the electrically conducting seawater moves around the Earth, it permanently interacts with the ambient magnetic field generated in the Earth’s core. During this process, the positively and negatively charged salt-ions in the sea-water are deflected by the Lorentz force, which leads to spatial accumulation of electric charge and, in turn, weak electric currents in the entire ocean basin. These oceanic electric currents induce characteristic magnetic signals in the range of a few nanotesla (nT) that are mainly proportional to combined transports of water, heat, and salinity in the ocean.

The project aims at parametrising and validating a viscoelastic earth model for applications in earth-system models, which are applied in the national paleo climate modelling initiative PalMod (https://www.palmod.de/de). PalMod is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF) (http://www.bmbf.de/en/index.html) to understand climate system dynamics and variability during the last glacial cycle.

The long-term vision of the Collaborative Research Centre 1464 "TerraQ" at Leibniz University Hannover is the establishment of an entirely new geodesy based on quantum physics and general relativity, which opens up unique perspectives for satellite geodesy and gravimetric Earth observation.

The German climate modelling initiative (PalMod II) is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF) through the Research for Sustainability (FONA) as a follow-up-project to PalMod. The project aims to simulate a complete glacial-interglacial cycle using complex Earth system models.