FWF - ALPCHANGE - Climate Change and Impacts in Southern Austrian Alpine Regions

ALPCHANGE quantifies landscape dynamics in alpine regions caused by climate change in past and present. ALPCHANGE provides an integrative and comprehensive analysis of monitoring data describing four dynamic landscape parameters - permafrost, glaciers, snow and geomorphology - in terms of the ongoing climate change. These parameters react in different time scales to climate change and are therefore providing different information: snow cover instantly, glaciers within years to decades, geomorphic features within years to decades and permafrost within decades to centuries. Complex analyses of these high mountain processes will be realized with the aid of an upgraded monitoring network for the very first time in southern Austria. The interdisciplinarity of the study approaches requires usage of different disciplines glaciology, geography, geophysics, atmosphere as well as climate physics, geology - and makes the cooperation of five scientific institutions necessary. Researchers from different Institutes of the University of Graz (UniGraz) and Graz University of Technology (TUG) have achieved significant competences in various fields of climate and environmental research over the last decade, including climate impact and global change research in general. The ALPCHANGE proposal was triggered by preparatory activities of Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change (WegCenter).