Meet PLOS Climate Academic Editor Andreas Morr

In this interview, we get to know Andreas Morr of TU Munich, who recently joined PLOS Climate as an Academic Editor in the journal’s new Methods in Climate Science section.

Could you tell us about your research background and your current work?

I am a mathematician and physicist by training. During my studies, I became increasingly interested in applying the abstract tools of mathematics to current challenges in the environmental sciences. I eventually settled in the field of climate science and, more specifically, in research on climate tipping points. This is a topic that benefits to a great degree from the insights of mathematical frameworks like dynamical systems theory and stochastic analysis. I completed my PhD on the merits and challenges of statistical early warning signals for climate tipping points. In previous years, such methods had been applied to observational climate data in order to gauge whether any suspected tipping points are approaching under ongoing climate change. Scrutinising the results from multiple mathematical angles has led to a more nuanced view of the warnings they provide. Together with my colleagues, we are currently advancing this work by investigating a broader class of indicators that can help determine the deterioration of climate systems. We summarise these indicators under the term “resilience” and find numerical quantification methods for generic dynamical systems. We hope that these theoretical insights can aid in the understanding of climate and other natural systems.

Why did you decide to join PLOS Climate as an Academic Editor?

I am honoured to contribute to the advancement of climate research. I am convinced that the pragmatic, open research ideal of PLOS Climate is the most promising approach to delivering timely communication to the scientific community and public stakeholders from the fast-evolving field of climate science.

What kinds of submissions to PLOS Climate would you encourage?

As an Academic Editor, I am mostly associated with the journal’s section on Methods in Climate Science. I encourage contributions to further interdisciplinary connections between idealised concepts and concrete challenges in climate science. We have seen a great proliferation of abstract methods from mathematics and statistical physics in recent years. This has yielded important insights and new perspectives on old problems. However, I believe that the link between any idealised model and the natural climate system, which is what justifies the application of such methods, warrants more attention. I would be delighted to see future research on methods in climate science focus on such rigorous links.