The Hans Ertel Centre for Weather Research (HErZ) Network

The Hans Ertel Centre for Weather Research (HErZ) is a research network comprising German universities, research institutes, and the German Meteorological Service (DWD), which aims to advance Earth system forecasting and climate monitoring. The research in HErZ is translated into operational activities at the German Meteorological Service (DWD). HErZ was established in 2011 with four-year funding periods endorsed by the German government. The current funding phase hosts seven research projects, including a junior research group. The overarching research focus of the current phase is "Earth System Prediction and Novel Data Acquisition for Weather and Climate Services". The projects address a wide range of topics, from improving weather forecasts with novel observations to developing a seamless climate prediction framework that spans timescales from a few minutes to decades, and from basic research to practical user applications. All contributions are grouped in three clusters: “seamless predictions”, “integration of novel observations” and “co-design and communication”.

We will discuss challenges, solutions, and share success stories on interdisciplinary collaborations within HErZ clusters and training efforts. For instance, for the cluster “seamless predictions”, the challenge in connecting the different communities is the timescale of relevant processes that often defines a predictability limit and interest for a particular research community. On the climatic scales, ocean processes are essential and are considered to be a memory of the climate system. Whereas on the weather timescale, oceanic forcing is considered mostly unchanged and sometimes even irrelevant. This view is currently challenged by the emerging opportunities of the high-resolution modelling that demonstrates impacts of explicitly modelling ocean mesoscale processes on the atmosphere, sea ice and even land processes. Another example is from the cluster “integration of novel observations”. The observational and training HErZ campaign “VITAL I” (Vertical profiling of the troposphere: Innovation, opTimization and AppLication) took place in August 2024 at the Jülich Observatory for Cloud Evolution and hosted researchers and students from seven German research facilities. The success of the campaign is not to be taken for granted, as often interdisciplinary collaboration is challenging not only due to obvious obstacles such as terminology specific to various research fields, but also due to long established institutional structures. HErZ encourages interdisciplinary collaboration by providing dedicated funding for such cross-institutional activities.

The modern world requires extraordinary flexibility and multilateral collaborations. Given the complexity of the Earth system in combination with pressing global issues, we recognise the necessity for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research as well as designing new training modules that address such complexity and urgency. We thus would like to discuss best practices in research networking and training, and opportunities of scaling them up.