Prof. Dr. Lucas Menzel

Lucas Menzel holds a full professorship (W3) in Hydrology and Climatology at Heidelberg University since 2009. He received his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich with a thesis about the simulation of evapotranspiration in the soil-vegetation-atmosphere interface. After he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH he joined the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in 1998. Between 2004 and 2009 he was assistant professor (C2) at the Center for Environmental Systems Research (CESR) at University of Kassel.

Research interests

Lucas Menzel has strong expertise in the coupling of basic research in physical geography, climatology and hydrology with interdisciplinary and application-oriented research questions. His special emphasis is on the water and energy fluxes at the soil-vegetation-atmosphere interface, with special regard to evapotranspiration and vegetation dynamics. He has broad experiences in the development and the application of simulation tools, such as the hydrological model TRAIN. The further refinement and calibration of the model is based on improved process understanding and new data obtained during extensive field experiments. The projects in which Lucas Menzel is involved encompass a wide field of research questions, such as the assessment of the water availability in semi-arid and arid as well as cold regions on Earth, the evaluation of the effects of climate and land use change on the elements of the water cycle of different landscapes, as well as the investigation of the processes during the development of hydrological extremes, with special focus on low flows and droughts.

Selection of recent publications

• Dong, C. & Menzel, L. (2017): Snow process monitoring in montane forests with time-lapse photography. Hydrological Processes, 31, 2872–2886, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hyp.11229
• Karthe, D., Chifflard, P., Cyffka, B., Menzel, L., Nacken, H., Raeder, U., Sommerhäuser, M. & Weiler, M. (2017): Water research in Germany: from the reconstruction of the Roman Rhine to a risk assessment for aquatic neophytes. Envrion. Earth Sci., 76, 3–16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12665-017-6863-7
• Aralova, D., Karieva, J., Toderich, K., Menzel, L., Halik, U. & Gofurov, D. (2017): Assessment of land degradation process and identification of long-term trends in vegetation dynamics in the drylands of Greater Central Asia. In: Squires, V. & Qi, L (Eds.): Sustainable land management in Greater Central Asia. Oxford (Routledge)
• Bronstert, A., Bormann, H., Bürger, G., Haberlandt, U., Hattermann, F., Heistermann, M., Huang, S., Kolokotronis, V., Kundzewicz, Z., Menzel, L., Meon, G., Merz, B., Meuser, A., Paton, E. N., Petrow, T. (2017): Hochwasser und Sturzfluten an Flüssen in Deutschland. In: Brasseur, G., Jacob, D., Schuck-Zöller, S. (Eds.): Klimawandel in Deutschland. Heidelberg (Springer Spektrum), 87–101
• Dong, C. & Menzel, L. (2016): Producing cloud-free MODIS snow cover products with conditional probability interpolation and meteorological data. Remote Sensing of Environment, 186, 439–451, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2016.09.019
• Liu, Z., Törnros, T. & Menzel, L. (2016): A probabilistic prediction network for hydrological drought identification and environmental flow assessment. Water Resources Research, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2016WR019106
• Liu, Z. & Menzel, L. (2016): Identifying long-term variations in vegetation and climatic variables and their scale dependent relationships: a case study in Southwest Germany. Global and Planetary Change, 147, 54–66, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2016.10.019