Dr. Elisa Ziegler

Elisa researches climate variability in Earth's past, present and future and its relationship to extremes and other climate impacts. She analyzes the dependence of variability on factors such as background state, temporal and spatial scales and forcings. Her research uses ensembles of climate models of varying complexity from comprehensive Earth System Models to intermediate complexity and conceptual models and contrasts them to observational data. In her master's thesis, she examined the components of the Earth's energy balance and the feedbacks at work in the climate system using an energy balance model, which she extended to enable transient simulations. In particular she explores how knowledge of past climate variability can inform expectations of future climate.

She is a member of the  Fresh Eyes on CMIP initiative as part of the infrastructure and technical subgroup and on the steering committee of  CVAS Phase 3. Her work contributes to the Palmod project.

• climate variability across time and space
• impacts of climate change
• climate model development and evaluation, simulation setup and analysis at every level of model complexity
• paleoclimate, esp. the Last Glacial Cycle, and projections of future climate

• climate modeling
• climate variability
• sustainable pathways

ORCID

• Chim, M. M., Stiller, D., Ziegler, E., Aubry, T. J., Boissel, L., Guillet, S., Rodgers, B., Toohey, M., Pohl, C., & Rozanov, A.: Stratospheric aerosol forcing for CMIP7 – Part 3: Comparison with CMIP6 and evaluation using complementary datasets. EGUsphere [preprint] doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4193
• Adam, M., Ziegler, E., Gonzalez, B., Weitzel, N., and Rehfeld, K.: Earth system models might overestimate the local plant productivity response to temperature–moisture extremes, EGUsphere [preprint], doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-626, 2026.
• Lavoie, J., Carreric, A., Duffey, A., Chellini, G., and Ziegler, E.: CMIP6 data usage: Lessons learned from more than 200 million downloads, EGUsphere [preprint], doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-1246, 2026.
• Aubry, T. J., Toohey, M., Khanal, S., Chim, M. M., Verkerk, M., Johnson, B., Schmidt, A., Kovilakam, M., Sigl, M., Nicholls, Z., Thomason, L., Naik, V., Rieger, L., Stiller, D., Ziegler, E., Durack, P., and Smith, I. H.: Stratospheric aerosol forcing for CMIP7 – Part 1: Optical properties for pre-industrial, historical, and scenario simulations. Geoscientific Model Development, 19(9), 3725–3756. doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-3725-2026. 2026. 
• Ziegler, E.: A Modeling Perspective on State and Timescale Dependency of Surface Climate Variability. Dissertation doi:10.15496/publikation-106066, 2025.
• Ziegler, E., Weitzel, N., Baudouin, J.-P., Kapsch, M.-L., Mikolajewicz, U., Gregoire, L., Ivanovic, R., Valdes, P. J., Wirths, C., and Rehfeld, K.: Patterns of changing surface climate variability from the Last Glacial Maximum to present in transient model simulations, Clim. Past, 21, 627–659, doi:10.5194/cp-21-627-2025, 2025.
• Weitzel, N., Andres, H., Baudouin, J.-P., Kapsch, M.-L., Mikolajewicz, U., Jonkers, L., Bothe, O., Ziegler, E., Kleinen, T., Paul, A., and Rehfeld, K.: Towards spatio-temporal comparison of simulated and reconstructed sea surface temperatures for the last deglaciation, Clim. Past, 20, 865–890, doi:10.5194/cp-20-865-2024, 2024.
• Friedlingstein, P., Artaxo, P., Gallego-Sala, A. V., Jia, G., Jones, C. D., Kawamiya, M., Loisel, J., Loutre, M.-F., Rehfeld, K., Rovere, A., Smith, C., Séférian, R., van der Wel, N., and Ziegler, E. (2024). Earth system responses to different levels of greenhouse gas emissions mitigation. Frontiers in Climate, 6. doi:10.3389/fclim.2024.1480208, 2024.
• T. Laepple, E. Ziegler, N. Weitzel, R. Hébert, B. Ellerhoff, P. Schoch, B. Martrat, O. Bothe, E. Moreno-Chamarro, M. Chevalier, A. Herbert & K. Rehfeld (2023): Regional but not global temperature variability underestimated by climate models at supradecadal timescales. Nature Geoscience, 16. doi:10.1038/s41561-023-01299-9
• B. Ellerhoff, M. J. Kirschner, E. Ziegler, M. D. Holloway, L. Sime, & K. Rehfeld (2022): Contrasting state-dependent effects of natural forcing on global and local climate variability. Geophysical Research Letters, 49. doi:10.1029/2022GL098335
• Pollak, F., Ziegler, E., Erokhina, O., and Rehfeld, K.: Climate Sensitivity and Convective Parameterization in the Earth System Model of Intermediate Complexity PlaSim. Proceedings of the 8th bwHPC Symposium 2022 (Online), doi.org/10.18419/opus-14626, 2022
• E. Ziegler & K. Rehfeld (2020): TransEBM v. 1.0: Description, tuning, and validation of a transient model of the Earth’s energy balance in two dimensions, Geoscientific Model Development, 14. doi:10.5194/gmd-14-2843-2021