🧭 Project Strategy

The PD28 / Climatic Footprints project followed a multi-step, integrative strategy designed to ensure robust and reproducible results.

🔄 Integrated Data & Methods

The approach combines:

• Observational Datasets: Satellite-derived records of sea ice concentration and cloud cover
• Reanalysis Products: State-of-the-art atmospheric and oceanic reanalysis datasets (e.g., ERA5)
• Climate Model Simulations: Historical and pre-industrial control runs from CMIP6 and AWI-ESM2.1

These data sources were analyzed using advanced statistical tools — EOF, CCA, composite analysis, and CCM — to disentangle anthropogenic and natural signals.

🎯 Ensuring Robustness

By comparing results across multiple datasets and methodologies, the project ensures that the identified “climatic footprints” are:

• Physically consistent – aligned with known climate dynamics
• Reproducible – appearing across independent datasets
• Robust – not artifacts of a single method or dataset

This strategy builds confidence in the attribution of observed changes to their underlying drivers.